Keith Duggan/Sideline Cut: It is a measure of the esteem in which the post of senior football manager is held in Kerry that even during his darkest hour, Páidí Ó Sé gave wistful voice to a brighter day when he might again betroth himself to the green and gold.
His leaving was regrettably messy, prolonged and inevitable and coated in bathos. It boiled down to the guardians of power having to prise, gently and then forcibly, an obsession that Ó Sé had probably begun to consider as private.
There is no doubting the ferocity of Ó Sé's respect and care for Kerry football and that he believes he has been halted even as his contribution to The Cause was about to reach full gallop. The termination of relationships between managers and counties is rarely a clean business, especially when that manager has for over 30 years been an anointed son. When you are as steeped in the culture as Ó Sé is, it is impossible to have the vision to know when to go. There will always, by definition, be another Sunday to turn things around, to set the game alight, to quell the discontent, to make Kerry football bigger and purer than ever before.
One of the contradictions of his reign was that despite his almost pathological eagerness not to stir any public interest in the affairs of Kerry football, Páidí created and presided over a series of spectacularly colourful incidents.
It was hard not to be amused by this and to feel a degree of sympathy for Ó Sé as he cautiously stepped through the minefields created by the Hassett row, the Maurice affair and the simile that provoked controversy in zoos across the globe. From his earliest days as a whippet of a corner back, Ó Sé has been a singular and forceful character, bubbling with life. The pity was he tried to suppress that once he came to office in Kerry, wilfully and pointlessly trying to blanch himself of all intrigue. It couldn't work. News follows Páidí like an obedient puppy.
So it was no surprise that his resignation statement was given the kind of treatment generally reserved for the end of political reigns. Such were the rumour and speculation all this week that it would have been no surprise if the Kerryman had echoed the quotation of another fallen leader as his valedictory: "It's true, I have done the State some service." For Kerry football is an independent state in its own right and the sacking of Páidí highlights just how relentless expectations are in that county.
By general standards, Ó Sé leaves behind him a distinguished managerial record. Within Kerry, however, opinions differ on that. It may take one or even two successive managerial administrations before Kerry people can assess Páidí's contribution to the native game with adequate distance and hindsight.
I believe the golden age of Ó Sé's reign in the Kingdom was in the immediate aftermath of last year's All-Ireland semi-final. Ó Sé sent out a team against Cork that blew us all away by hitting a sustained and pitch-perfect operatic note. Kerry folk spilled out of the stadium humming and pacified and pleased. The manner of the win rectified the 2001 implosion against Meath and re-established a championship season that had begun so gloomily against Cork early in the Munster championship.
Kerry were not aided by the bad karma caused by the fallout of the Darragh Ó Sé controversy in the build-up to the Armagh game. And they met an Ulster team possessed of the opposite: an unassailable and tranquil conviction that their time had come. Although the true story of the 2002 All-Ireland football final is about Armagh's verve and bravery, Kerry came close. Early in the second half, a Kerry forward, Liam Hassett if memory serves, kicked a point into the Canal End and raised a fist that seemed to suggest Kerry were about to switch into their own unique gear, sumptuous and easeful. They were almost home - one more point might have proven a bridge too far for Armagh - but Kerry seemed to relax with Hassett's score, as if they mentally discarded the possibility of an Armagh charge.
Since then, reading Ó Sé's Kerry has been a perilous job. Fans and observers alike seemed flabbergasted but not necessarily surprised by Kerry's muted and rudderless performance in the face of the Tyrone tornado. Put back to back with the Armagh loss, the relinquishing of an All-Ireland title Kerry people believed was theirs, was too much to countenance.
The more you think about Kerry and Tyrone, the stranger it seems. It has been remarked that Ó Sé (and his managerial team) ought to have been aware of Tyrone's tactics. And in retrospect, they must have been. But perhaps he did not plan against them because he believed implicitly in Kerry football. Kerry's expressionism - their peerless and endless appreciation of the aesthetics of the game - has always been a separating factor. It is that as much as the 32 All-Ireland titles that gives Kerry football its lustre. Páidí was instinctively and wilfully loyal to that principle. Such was the totality of defeat against Tyrone that Kerry's attacking tour de force against Roscommon in the All-Ireland quarter-final has already been forgotten. A leaky defence was the only caveat arising from that game. Nobody predicted that Kerry's array of elegant forwards would hit a stone wall against Tyrone. If Ó Sé was ambushed that day, so was everybody else. But, of course, it was his job to avoid such scenarios.
The Ó Sé legacy is tough to assess. In Kerry, they tend to stack away All-Irelands accumulated and fixate upon the ones that might have been. Just why Kerry disappeared in two semi-finals will be of general bother to Kerry people even as it is certain to trouble Páidí himself when he ruminates on the last few years. And there remains the question as to just how good, post-Maurice, Kerry really are. The man who follows Páidí will have the task of making that clear.
Atonement was Ó Sé's main reason for wanting to stay on. From the day he got the job, there has been the sense that Páidí has been trying to make up for never quite being part of the establishment. In that 1970s team full of princes, Páidí somehow acquired the role of jester. By turns restless and extrovert, a bon viveur and firebrand, Ó Sé also has a lonely quality to his personality.
It is highly probable Ó Sé would have taken Kerry back to an All-Ireland semi-final next year. His heavily prompted adieu means the standard is higher than that in Kerry; it means deliverance is everything. Whether such aspirations are self-deluding will be seen over the next couple of seasons.
But it is highly unlikely Páidí will get his wish. With the football landscape shifting by the year, there is the sense that Kerry football will also have to take a change in direction. Winning is now the premium and beauty may well have to take second place. So much so that in decades to come, the so-called Wild Man of Ventry may come to be regarded as the last of the aesthetes.
