Mickey Whelan will have fond memories as he prepares his Marino side to meet Nemo Rangers in the All-Ireland club championship final on St Patrick's Day.

THE JOSTLING began in earnest nearly three months ago when Paul Kerrigan, the livewire Nemo and Cork under-21 forward, was interviewed after the club's win in the Munster final against Ballinacourty. Responding to a question about the more ambitious claims being made on behalf of All-Ireland champions Crossmaglen Rangers, Kerrigan - after a fashion - blasted out a warning before remembering protocol.

"When they win seven or eight they can call themselves the best. It would be intriguing to meet Crossmaglen in the final but we've to concentrate on the semi-final; we failed there two years ago against Gall's. We really want to get to a final again."

That circumspection was considered wise at the time given that All-Ireland semi-final opponents Ballina had been recent champions themselves and the need to get to the end of the runway before taking off looked more necessary in Nemo's case than in Crossmaglen's.

All sorts of charges of complacency have been levelled at the deposed champions since their surprise eclipse in Navan but it's hard to think of a club side that has left less to chance over the years than the perennial Armagh title holders for whom Sunday was the most comprehensive defeat ever experienced in the All-Ireland club championship.

It's no disrespect to the Dublin club to note that it wasn't only Nemo Rangers who would have considered a final between themselves and Cross as intriguing.

After all this was a great opportunity to pitch together the top two clubs on the roll of honour: the most successful modern club against the most successful over the four decades of the championship.

As sometimes happens with these highly desirable but notional finals, it never happened. It was ironic that the iconoclasm that prevented the Cross-Nemo final was the work not of some brash interlopers but of the most iconic club in Dublin football, one whose connection with its county's greatest achievements has been every bit as significant, if not more so, than Nemo's and Crossmaglen's.

It's safe to say that the Vincent's clubhouse in Marino wouldn't be short of elder statesmen who wouldn't be impressed with the idea that their club should be considered rank outsiders against any team from Armagh regardless of their sideboard.

That operates at a visceral level. It's not that Vincent's would be fantasists in the face of a remorseless, silverware-consuming machine like Crossmaglen, particularly as the Dublin side's consumption has been conspicuously less than voracious in recent years, but they would have a sense of themselves as primary contributors to the phenomenon that is the Dubs and a strong memory that when that reputation was being forged they were as big a name as any in the club championship.

Their fortunes and those of Dublin, Nemo and Cork have entangled down the years and that micro-history will make next month's club final every bit as intriguing in its own way as the final that never was.

When the club championship was in its infancy Nemo and Vincent's became early rivals. That rivalry was sharpened by personal contact. Billy Morgan and Jimmy Keaveney became friends and the Dublin forward and his wife, Angela, were visiting the Morgans not long before the 1974 All-Ireland semi-final between Kevin Heffernan's Dublin and the then champions, Cork.

After a party in Frank Cogan's house the Sam Maguire was waved at Keaveney, as Cogan mock-warned his guest: "Take a look at that. It'll be the last ye'll see of it."

Heffernan inevitably turned the anecdote into an arrogant taunt.

By the time Dublin dethroned the champions many of the players had already played championship - in the dramatic 1973 club final, won after a replay by Nemo.

Vincent's avenged that defeat three years later in the semi-finals, blitzing the Cork team by 0-10 to 0-3 at the Mardyke on the way to winning the club's only All-Ireland title.

What goes around comes around. Mickey Whelan played for and coached that Vincent's team. Last Sunday in Navan, again in charge, he faced the media afterwards bubbling with the trademark enthusiasm for the game, its tactical challenges and his young players.

There's a karmic symmetry about the achievement. For most of his coaching career Whelan has been well thought of as an innovative and intelligent practitioner. Unfortunately his highest-profile appointment was controversial.

Taking over the reins of Dublin as All-Ireland champions in 1995 after Pat O'Neill's management stepped down, Whelan was faced with a team that might have had another title in them but similarly might have needed an overhaul. His tenure ended unhappily and intemperately with a League crowd in Parnell Park baying for his removal.

He left silently and with the stuffing knocked out of him. His brash determination to fashion a seasoned team into one bearing his hallmark might have been unrealistic in the circumstances but no one looking back could feel Whelan was not harshly treated.

As he said in an interview with Tom Humphries in this newspaper two months ago: "I still believed in what I could do but it was the only time in my life that I wasn't overtly successful. The stuff in the media portrayed me as a gobshite. I mightn't be the brightest guy but I'm not a gobshite. That hurt me."

That could have been his sign-off but at the weekend he dismantled the most formidable club side of modern times with tactical innovation and unabashed forward-driven dynamism.

At 69 he takes his team down the road he has already travelled 32 years ago and against the club that Vincent's defeated along the way.

Thereafter the road divided. Like two apparently inseparable kids whose fortunes diverge, Vincent's and Nemo moved on to radically different futures: Nemo to dominate the club championships and Vincent's to lose touch with that level and eventually to become also-rans in their county.

So there'll be more than a flicker of recognition when the two clubs come face to face on Patrick's Day, a remembrance of times past.