LOCKER ROOM: Pat Gilroy and Mickey Whelan will try to replicate with Dublin what they achieved at St Vincent's

WHO REMEMBERS 1983? Every Dub of a certain age does. We remember the broad brush strokes and primary colours, though, not the detail. We recall the results but not the mood.

Barney's equaliser! That mad-antic Bank Holiday trip to Cork! We remember those things. Twelve Dubs finishing off a fetid final. Unforgettable! Back then we had not an inkling the Blues would win just one more All- Ireland in the next quarter of a century. No clue that when we would manage to win a title a dozen years later we would go on to play the next 13 seasons without reaching a final again.

Nineteen-eighty-three was different from even 1995 in so many respects. Thirteen years ago Dublin won an All-Ireland they had closed in on incrementally with a team that had its core in Gerry McCaul's outfit that lost the All-Ireland semi-final to Cork in 1989.

It was a team which had learned some crushingly hard lessons every year thereafter until finally they got enough right to get themselves over the line in 1995.

They were a tough, hard-working, fretful team who were easy to love. They are a good halfway measuring point on how Dublin got from 1983 to here.

1983. Dublin were separated by only a few seasons from a run of six All-Ireland final appearances in a row. There was a residual swagger and confidence which has been eroded by time and failure. Now we tremble easily.

1983! Meath were afraid to put Dublin away. They came close but couldn't quite do it. Offaly in the Leinster final arrived as All-Ireland champions, sure and intent that they would be putting Dublin out of the game within five minutes. The Dubs snatched two early goals and that was it. A coup.

And that drawn game with Cork. That's what we really want to talk about. Dublin were young and inexperienced and learning with each game. Cork were a team whose excellence had been interrupted. Fine All-Ireland champions in 1973, they had lost the 1974 semi-final to an upstart Dublin team and had then been imprisoned in Munster for eight long years.

Now they were liberated. Only a young Dublin team some of whom were hardly shaving and the ethereally lightweight Donegal and Galway stood between Cork and an All-Ireland. Cork had been banging their heads off the wall for all the years of Kerry's excellence, listening year in and year out to the faff about how they were the second-best team in Ireland. This was their time.

They were home and dry in Croke Park when Hazley, Mullins and Rock combined to save Dublin. Then the Cork County Board had a brainwave. The replay should be in Cork. Replay? It would be a celebration! A pageant! A fitting return to the big time for the footballers of Rebel Nation. Let it be!

And to their surprise when he was asked about this, Kevin Heffernan instantly said yes, fine. Let's play it in Cork. Bring it on.

Dublin football has lost many things in the quarter of a century since then but most of all it has lost that wonderful certainty. That moment when the Heff said yes sums up what should be great about Dublin football.

The 4-15 Dublin scored in that delirious, sun-soaked replay by the Lee was the physical, footballing manifestation of his confidence.

Cork put themselves under too much pressure, as Heffernan knew they would. Heffernan, by agreeing to travel, delivered a message of incredible confidence to his young players. If Heffernan thought for a moment that Dublin would lose in Cork he would have dug his heels and they would still be there. They all knew that.

Where did it go to, that feeling that Dublin simply belong in the big time, the notion that by virtue of being Dublin, they should fear nothing? The county's relationship with Tyrone is a fascinating barometer of ebbing confidence. When Dublin met Tyrone in the All-Ireland of 1995, the only things which stood between Dublin and outright complacency were the shattering experiences of 1994 and more particularly 1992. They knew they shouldn't lose to Tyrone, but they knew they could. So they waited till after the game to celebrate winning an All-Ireland.

Fast forward a decade. Tyrone again. The quarter-final draw and replay of 2005 were odd affairs during the course of which Tyrone learned what their best team was and Dublin discovered that a single moment, in this case Owen Mulligan's goal, could send their confidence sluicing out through their boots.

A few months later came the so-called Battle of Omagh. Much has been made of Dublin's infamous "Blue Book" in the past couple of months. Unfairly really. Any losing team's hocus pocus can be held up for ridicule if the overall effort doesn't work.

If Clare had failed in 1995 people would have laughed at them for running up and down that hill in Crusheen for months on end. Jack O'Connor walked Kerry through the Gap of Dunloe. Liam Griffin made Wexford get off the bus at the county border. Joe Kernan flung his loser's plaque about the dressing-room.

If Tyrone had been beaten last month the thought of them facing tackle bags which had been stuffed into Kerry jerseys would be ripe for derision.

Dublin lost so the Blue Book becomes a source of embarrassment.

In reality though, all that was really distressing about the Blue Book was the bizarre emphasis placed on the absurdly titled Battle of Omagh. All that happened that afternoon was that on the first day of the new league Dublin insulted the All-Ireland champions by failing to applaud them onto the field as is tradition. Tyrone, waking slowly from a winter of celebration, found there were some hits to be taken. They were alert enough to return those hits. End of story really apart from the media swoon.

By imagining this spat was an epic adventure that had turned their boys into men, Dublin, in my view anyway, got the wrong end of the stick. In doing so they unwittingly made themselves more subservient to Tyrone and to Mickey Harte's mind games. Unfortunate because since Heffernan retired Harte is probably the shrewdest player of mind games that football has seen.

So Dublin lost, in increasingly distressing circumstances, the big floodlit game at the start of 2007 and then this year's All-Ireland quarter-final. Between times there were plenty of other losses of nerve and composure.

Have Dublin learned to fear even their own shadow? Right now there is an increasingly shrill demand around the county that the new Dublin management team of Pat Gilroy, Mickey Whelan and co stamp their feet and refuse to play Tyrone in Croke Park in the opening round of the league in a floodlit fixture which would mark the start of the GAA's 125th anniversary celebrations.

What a depression-style crash in confidence stocks that represents! What a betrayal of the old swagger that would be. Croke Park in front of a full house is where Dublin belong and where Dublin should be every chance they get. If they don't win, let them learn.

Through the spring and summer of 2007 and then through last winter, Pat Gilroy and Mickey Whelan spent their time putting some extraordinary self-belief into a St Vincent's football team which hadn't won a county title in over two decades.

As much as the football they played it was the conviction they played it with which brought them past experienced heavyweights like Portlaoise, Crossmaglen and Nemo Rangers. That belief was put together slowly and deliberately as was a side with the intelligence and desire to use the belief. That achievement is what made Gilroy and Whelan the outstanding candidates for the job.

Dublin will play Tyrone under lights and in front of a packed house in February. They will welcome that chance and see it as a starting point on the long road to retrieving the swagger.

All good in this hood.