There are some things you can count on when Kerry are in an All-Ireland final. The chrysanthemums on the altars of some churches will be green and gold tomorrow morning. Cars and the odd donkey have been painted in the county colours.
Players from rural clubs - from Rathmore, from Firies, from Finuge, and An Ghaeltacht to the west - usually predominate in the squad.
There are never enough tickets for the trains or the match. But one thing is strikingly different this year. The player who has stolen the imagination of the kingdom was not reared in the dramatic landscape of the Iveragh peninsula.
He did not kick football by the banks of the Laune river or learn to storm the goal on solo runs in the fields on Valentia Island.
Colm Cooper, the 19-year-old boy wonder, is from a housing estate in Killarney. In the Ardshanavooly estate, every house has a flag. Some have two. It's a sea of green and gold.
On Tuesday, Cooper, a student, was "up the back" as the women put it, playing football with the children in the small open spaces, as he always does. Every child in the 120-house estate was "from next door to the Coopers", by Thursday evening. Katie Looney (11) does not live in Ardshanavooly "but my grandmother does and I am always out here".
"Ardshan" as it is affectionately known by its residents in its thirty years, has produced international basketball players, as well as good pitch-and-putt players, golfers and athletes. One summer, the children came home with 39 gold medals from the Community Games in Mosney.
"There was a residents association when we came out here first. We got rid of that and created a sports association," said Mr Sean Counihan, a Labour town councillor and former selector of the Kerry football team. He lives across from the Coopers.
Four of the town's nine councillors - Mr Sean Counihan, Mr Sean O'Grady, and Mr Donal Grady, Mr Michael Courtney, the chairman of Cork-Kerry tourism, live on the estate. That Colm Cooper comes from Ardshanavooly, ( the word comes from the place name Ard sean Bhuaile, an old milking place or tending field) is hugely important, Mr Counihan says. "It's the shot in the arm Gaelic football needs in the urban areas. "The only sore point is around here , they'll all be mad to join the Crokes now," he said, referring to the arch rivalry between the Legion and Dr Crokes, Killarney's two town teams.Large signs have gone up at the entrance to the estate, opposite the Torc Hotel in Killarney, in the past two days . The signs offer the standard good wishes. The biggest, from "the gang" can't resist a black and white subtitle: "Go on the Gooch"- Cooper's nickname. Thirty youngsters on the estate put up the €5 each to pay for it.