At the centre of all inquiries directed at DJ Carey these days is the one lingering question. He knows it himself, and as if discomfited by its potential for mischief, dexterously deflects any attempts to wheedle it out. What's the difference this year?

"We got to an All-Ireland and won a Leinster title and I was part of that," he begins tangentially. "We had a pretty good year. It was just every time I played the retirement issue came up and came up.

"It still does. The same questions are coming up like `what's the difference this year?'. The answer is there probably isn't a big difference. I put the retirement thing behind me and got on and hurled."

The `retirement thing' was one of the biggest sports stories anyone could imagine. The biggest name in hurling decides to call it a day at the age of 27. That day 19 months ago got the rumour machines going like a factory hooter.

Amongst those rumours and behind-hand whispers and those which had preceded and even triggered the retirement lurks the reason which provides the fascinating counterpoint to the events of the season concluding tomorrow.

It's probable that no-one will ever quite isolate the reason why DJ Carey decided that the atmosphere surrounding him had turned so toxic that he must quit the game or what remedies persuaded him to change his mind only a few weeks later. The main reason this is so is that he himself doesn't seem entirely sure at this stage why it happened.

There was unpleasantness in the air and his commitment to the game and motives were questioned. He wanted money. He wanted to play golf. He was going to play golf. Gossip provided the helium for the snidest of theories and suddenly they were airborne. A plausible explanation is that had he thought about it for a couple of days, he would never have gone through with the decision.

"The pressures have eased and I've probably grown up a bit myself too," he says. "I felt there was too much going on around me and that's been well printed and I felt that I didn't want to be part of that. Why should my head be on the block every time I go out on the field? You don't perform or Kilkenny don't perform, why should you have to put up with that?

"I felt I wouldn't be able to perform in the championship at the level I wanted and I didn't want to go into a championship being half-minded about it. Probably I've learned to grow up a little bit and realise that whatever goes on with me, goes on with everyone else.

"From outside looking in is one thing. A person who picks up a paper and reads about it, it doesn't affect him. And you've got to realise that whatever is being said, you're the last to hear it yourself. That person reading the paper can say `oh yeah, I always knew that about him'. But if that sort of rumour-mongering happened to yourself on a wide basis, you'd find it hard to take.

"You feel set up every time you go out to play. Maybe I was being a bit paranoid about everything but I'm human and a bit soft by nature. It's very difficult to take."

These events are of a different dimension to the world he now occupies. After emerging from retirement last spring, he passed a mediocre championship as Kilkenny stumbled into the All-Ireland final and lost to Offaly. Now, at the climax of what sharp hurling judges consider may be Carey's best ever season and which has seen him amass 5-9 mostly from play, the sifting for clues to this transformation continues.

Carey himself prefers to undermine the query by minimising the gulf between the years. This he does by talking up his performances last year and steering all speculation about his specific improvement into territory exclusively to do with the collective. What's the difference, DJ?

"I don't know. I suppose we got to an All-Ireland last year, not playing particularly well but we got there and lost an All-Ireland. That's a spur and the nucleus of that side's still there. Then you've had the re-introduction of John Power and the introduction of Henry Shefflin and that would be a big boost and overall the team is hurling much better.

"Plus we've got the bounce of the ball this year. By and large any hurler who comes out of Kilkenny is fairly good but you've got to have the ball bouncing right. But our form all year has been reasonably good from the League on. It didn't just happen in a flash."

There's no real mystery about the improvement in most people's eyes. For a start - and he's happy to volunteer this himself - there hasn't been the litany of injuries which undermined his recent seasons.

Secondly, under the new management of Brian Cody, there's a calmer feel to Kilkenny's set-up. Carey's relationship with Cody's predecessor Kevin Fennelly was much speculated-upon but it wouldn't be controversial to say that the player - for all their shared love of golf - wouldn't have felt included in the manager's circle.

A year later, the player is careful not to give offence to Fennelly when praising Cody. "Without getting in and dogging anyone else because it's very hard to speak about someone especially when there's someone else just gone but he's come in with a wealth of knowledge of what it's like to win and lose, what it's like to be run down and blown up. He's come in with a certain manner, cool and collected."

Yet reserve is undeniably apparent when the question of any surviving relationship with Fennelly surfaces. "No, but we never had much of a social relationship. I don't drink or smoke so I wouldn't be out that often. We used to play a bit of golf every now and then and we were in Spain at the Ryder Cup. But his path would be different to mine so we haven't really come across each other much but if we did, I don't think there'd be a problem."

On the field, matters have improved for him with the addition of John Power (out-of-favour last year) and Henry Shefflin (fresh off the county's conveyor belt). When taken with Brian McEvoy's outstanding development and the red-hot form of Carey himself, Kilkenny go into tomorrow's final as favourites.

His self-portrait as someone who's a "bit soft" is borne out by so many other flashes from his life. That someone who embodied the Guinness billboard ad about one man levelling an entire county could be pushed to verge of distraction by the pressures of petty rumour-mongering is incongruous.

That someone who had the papers lining him up since he was a schoolboy should still be so co-operative with the media is also surprising but then he - probably naively - identifies a community of interest between players and journalists and is happy to play his part in promoting the GAA.

More practically he knows that a profile helps in his business but even that livelihood took a toll on his sensitivity. "Maybe two years ago or more it was a lot more difficult because I was trying to build up the business and meet commitments as well as hurl," he says.

"That's when you're pulling the hair out of your head on a Sunday during a game wondering where a cheque is going to come to meet the bank on Sunday. That's when it's tough. Now I'm no millionaire but business is going well."

The image illustrates the crazy extremes of the amateur game. A man in his mid-20s may be a hurling god but in an amateur context, he stands there trying to concentrate on the ball while his head makes a doomed attempt at a bank reconciliation. The game eats away at his time and indirectly feeds his anxieties.

Business concerns allayed, he is now into a new phase of personal dilemma. "It's also tough when you've little men here, one, two years of age, and he realises you're trying to sneak away from him to train. In the morning you leave and you're not coming back until half ten at night."

During the Kilkenny Arts Festival, a 20-foot effigy of DJ Carey was carried through the streets of Kilkenny as part of the celebration of hurling as art. He never got to see the pageant because having brought his family into town, he couldn't get parking.

That's for now. Posterity may well find 20 feet a bit on the short side.