All-Ireland SFC Final/Mayo v Kerry: This weekend, the exiles will flood back into Mayo and, in particular, to Tourmakeady, the verdant stretch of townland that runs between the shore of Lough Mask and the dark Party Mountains. On Mayo's football scroll of honour, Tourmakeady has made little impression, but in terms of the game and its meaning to Mayo the place represents what is vaguely referred to as "the heartland".

For most of the last century, Tourmakeady has bled people. Just as Achill folk gravitated towards Cleveland, Tourmakeady worked up an unbreakable affinity with Chicago. Since the 1930s, Tourmakeady men worked on the sky-reaching buildings off Lake Michigan, pining for the plain and familiar shore of the Mask, one of the untapped beauty spots of the west.

The leaving continued more or less unchecked until the 1980s ended, and now that the exodus has stopped it is said there are as many Tourmakeady people out in America as are left in the native area.

"The club here did two tours of Chicago, one in 1979 and again in 1986," says Tourmakeady club chairman Pádraig Ó hÉanacháin. "I ended up going out ahead of the club in 1986, so I was in the airport when the team landed. Growing up, I was always aware of the connection, but it was only that night in the arrival hall I learned the scale of it. There must have been 500 people waiting there with Tourmakeady links."

The Ó hÉanacháins do not consider themselves anything other than an ordinary GAA/Mayo family, and yet they are immersed in Gaelic football. Pádraig played on the 1981 Tourmakeady championship side that caused a bit of a stir by beating Garrymore - "they were the kingpins then" - in the Under-16 B championship.

The club would win a county junior title the following year and had reason to be optimistic for the seasons ahead. But by the time that generation of Under-16 footballers reached the Under-21 grade, nine of their number had left Ireland.

Pádraig, a bank manager in Westport, was one who stayed. Like his father Tom, a schoolmaster in the nearby townland of Srath, he grew accustomed to watching the phenomenon of young people disappearing.

Emigration was always a fact, but after Tom secured a teaching post in Tourmakeady in 1947, it worsened dramatically.

"Nearly every lad I went to school with left," Tom says. "Nearly every one of them. Some would come back for a visit, but others were not seen around here again. All of the lads I went to school with had big families - 12 in that house, nine in that - they all left. I would say the present population is not even half of what it was, especially in the southern half.

"The 50s was the worst. While it was bad in the 30s, at least then it was confined to America. World War II, funnily, put a stop to it, and although there was fairly dire poverty, there was good fun around here. In the 50s, they started for England. There were bad stories of men tramping all over the place looking for work.

"They used to tell how they would move a cow lying down in a field and sleep in the spot for warmth. Entire families left. Houses closed up. It was really frightening. We felt that whole townlands would close down. It was really depressing."

Tom attended Mayo's first All-Ireland victory, over Laois in 1936. He can still name that team, starting with Tom Burke in goal, at the drop of the hat, and because he was 14 and in thrall he possibly retains a stronger affection for them than the famous 1950/51 Mayo team.

Football was unorganised in Tourmakeady then - "We made attempts at it when we had a ball" - but interest in the game was enthusiastic.

The local schoolteacher was a GAA and Fianna Fáil fanatic and made it his business to secure a copy of the Irish Press newspapers that were delivered on the milk lorry. Eventually a number of Fianna Fáil-oriented men took to gathering at Donoghue's shoemakers on a nightly basis.

"A namesake of my own, Lord have mercy on him, would read the paper aloud for those that had gathered there. Green Flag was the big GAA columnist. And then the rows would start."

Tom married into distinguished football stock. His wife, Joan O'Neill, came from Ballinrobe, and her brother Owen Roe played in goal for Mayo in the mid-1950s, including the All-Ireland semi-final defeat against Dublin in 1955. A particular save he made from Kevin Heffernan earned him the sobriquet "the prince of goalkeepers" from a young Michael O'Hehir.

Her younger brother, Art, a suitably named forward full of skill and guile, was deemed to be one of the best young footballers in the county, and although he played for Mayo in 1959 at the age of 20, his career was sadly ended by a serious knee injury.

Ballinrobe was generally the point of departure for family members forced into emigration, and from her early childhood Joan considered the now defunct railway station a place to dread.

"It was always a very morbid thing. I have a terrible memory of Ballinrobe railway station, I hated going there. Because any time you would go there you would find parents bringing maybe their daughters or their sons there and crying their hearts out. Because there was always the chance they would never see them again. It was horrendous."

Tourmakeady CLG came into existence in 1965. Around the same time, Gaeltarra Éireann set up a knitwear factory in the village, a small, vital industry whose worth was infinitely greater than the profit it showed on the ledger.

It was a means for some young people to remain in the area and, more significantly, it attracted some new people into the area. Through the dark years, the lights from the knitwear factory were a comfort. Three years ago, though, it was switched to Bangalore, India.

"I worked there myself for a brief period in the mid-1980s," Pádraig says. "I suppose there was about 60 of us in there at the time, which is significant in a small community."

"Without it," Tom says, "the whole thing would have been a wash-out."

As with the rest of the country, Tourmakeady stabilised in the final years of the last century. The bleeding stopped. Drive through the place this September and you are struck not with any sign of lingering poverty but by the deep and untouched beauty of the place. There are plenty of fine houses with stunning views of the choppy, black waters of Lough Mask. Many are the summer dwellings of the sons of Tourmakeady who found wealth in Chicago.

Tourmakeady has millionaires now, though not necessarily in Tourmakeady. Through the decades, generous sums of money found their way across the Atlantic. For families. For the church renovations. For the club. The covered stand is called Ardán na nDeoraí. The Exiles Stand. The Stand of Tears.

It is a pretty ground, Tourmakeady's, located in a low spot to give it some cover from the wind that blows off the lough. When Mayo are on the All-Ireland trail all club activity stops, so it will be a winter championship for Tourmakeady this season.

The fervent hope is, of course, that the Sam Maguire will visit the clubhouse before Christmas. It arrived courtesy of the Galway footballers in 1998, but, as Pádraig laughs, "that is not quite the same thing". Although Tom was a lucky charm as he watched from the Railway End in 1936, he will not travel to this final.

"I am old and grey and full of sleep," he quotes with mock self-pity while Joan throws her eyes to heaven. He might as well be charged with minding Tourmakeady for the day for all that will be left in it.

Regardless of how Sunday's final goes, Tourmakeady will enjoy a series of homecomings that will start in earnest tonight and last for the rest of the week.

"People's hearts stay here, I am convinced of that," Joan said.

In the grimmest days, it was feared that Tourmakeady might fall into complete abandonment. That has not happened, although emigration has altered the natural demographic of the area harshly. In Tom's teaching days, there was a period when the national school in Srath had three teachers and 110 pupils. Today it houses 14 kids.

The census would probably register the current population at around 1,100, but of course the census does not travel as far as the Irish haunts of Chicago. Perhaps this week would give a truer reflection of its people.

Pádraig Ó hÉanacháin is looking forward to meeting some school friends he has not seen in a while. They will talk about the All-Ireland, of course, and of how the country is going. And they will undoubtedly, after a few down in O'Tooles or the Lough Mask Inn, revive the stories of their indomitable days on the Under-16 B circuit in Mayo, when they were champions and ready to take on the world.

Which, in a way, they did, although not as they would have imagined.