One day late last summer, Declan Darcy got a phone call to his house. He now describes it as an "indirect call". Would he come out and look at a local junior football team with the caller? Puzzled but co-operative, he headed off the match.

"At the time it didn't dawn on me who this particular person was. When I saw him and met him, I knew exactly who he was," recalls Darcy. The team involved was from Clanna Gael in Sandymount, Darcy's original club, and the person he met was Christy Kane, from Clanna Gael and then a Dublin selector.

The context was obvious. Darcy was well-known in football for having captained Leitrim to a first Connacht title in 67 years in 1994.

More than that, his leadership from centre back, his icy dispatch of pressure frees (last kicks of matches which beat Roscommon and drew with Galway) and his intelligence as a footballer marked him out even among the historic trappings of the season.

By 1996 and '97, he had switched to the attack, where his career had started. Abundant scoring returns ensued. A year ago, when two matches in Connacht constituted his entire season, Darcy was outscored by only three players in the whole championship. His average of 1-10 per match was more than twice as high as the nearest contender.

But what connected the player and Kane on that evening was the fact that Darcy is not from Leitrim; he is a Dubliner. It had emerged from the Connacht titlerun in 1994, and indeed before but to less interest, that the player lived in Dublin but played with Aughawillan in Leitrim, the club his father Frank helped re-establish, and had gone on to represent his father's county.

Darcy's visit to the victorious Dublin dressingroom after the 1994 All-Ireland semi-final was unusual for a losing captain. "I suppose this is the only way I'll get see the inside of a Dublin dressingroom," he cracked.

"He was as nervous as I was," says Darcy of his meeting with Kane, "very on edge. When he asked me would I be interested in playing for Dublin, I was flabbergasted. Straight away, something in my heart, something that was always in the back of my mind, was there. Something that I felt every time Dublin played, but especially when they won the All-Ireland in '95.

"I felt that there had been an injustice in the system. How come I didn't get the chance? I'd be a fool to say I didn't get a fair crack of the whip, but I had gone to Dublin trials at under-age level and whether I had actually played man-of-the-match in the game, I don't think I was ever going to make it from the position I was coming from.

"Clanna Gael-Fontenoys is a small club and the fact that it was a south-side club with no reputation was going to make it extremely hard for a player like me to come along and break the mould." Being overlooked by Dublin confirmed Darcy's road to the west. Having joined in the Leitrim and Aughawillan kickarounds, organised by his father Frank in Dublin, Declan was incrementally ensnared.

An occasional invitation to go back to Aughawillan and train with them became something more insistent. He now rationalises that the lack of role models within the modest playing confines of Clanna Gael ("our best players were always poached") had an effect on his teenage perception because down in Aughawillan he was drawn to the aura of the man who was to become Leitrim's first All Star.

"Mickey Quinn epitomised everything I wanted to be," says Darcy. "I modelled myself on him. Mickey was way ahead of a lot of players. His whole lifestyle was geared to football. I was dragged in by his passion and his will to win.

"At under-age, I was small and nothing special as a footballer. I never saw myself as anything like an inter-county player. I was average, but very determined. I would have been happy to win a county title. That would have been the limit of my ambition.

"Even now my ability as a footballer isn't startling. One thing I do have is dogged determination. I put an awful lot of work into my game, an awful lot. Day in, day out, I put a lot of time, thought and effort in. That's what makes me survive in the big league."

The trajectory of his career has been unpredictable. Eclectically dispatched to school in Newpark, a co-educational comprehensive in Blackrock, south county Dublin, where hockey was the game, Darcy was perplexed.

"I never forgave my mother. I didn't know what the plot was. All I wanted was to play football." In general, he now appreciates the facilities at the school and the encouragement he received to pursue his own sporting lights and the space he was allowed.

His move to centre back, despite his being, in his own estimation, a natural forward, came about during a match with the Leitrim minors against Offaly in Cloone. Leitrim were being well beaten at half-time when manager Tony McGowan decided to switch Darcy from wing forward to centre back.

"It was one of those days," says Darcy, "that every ball that came, came straight to me. It was a terrible afternoon, mucky and disgusting, but we turned it around and won and my move to centre back made the difference. It was just one of those half-hours. I was a revelation in the position and that was it.

"At senior level, I was more attack-conscious and could feed of Mickey Quinn and Pat Donohue, a very strong midfield. I was scoring a point from play in every game and kicking 50s - looking great. After a couple of years, teams eventually looked at it and saw my marking abilities weren't as strong as they should be and began to mark me, put runners on me and tried to expose me. It worked to an extent because I was by nature a forward."

Determination, doggedness and effort represent the currency of Darcy's frequently prosaic evaluation of his talents. He admits that, at 28, he has given no thought to his future career and works with his father while granting an undiffused focus to football. His is an almost professional lifestyle, but his allegiance is not for sale.

It has been a matter of some resentment to Darcy that his transfer back to the capital has been interpreted as glory-hunting on his part and avarice on Dublin's.

"There's been people saying I only did it to win a medal. I came to Dublin to play for Dublin, not to win anything - better again if we do win, but that's not why I came. Even in 1994, I kept saying that I'm a Dublin-born person and very proud of the fact.

"Often I sat here with my mother and father and thought about playing for Dublin. The way I was going, I wasn't going to make the Dublin team. I was heading off on another path. Obviously proving Dublin wrong that they'd missed me - this was being said. But in a way I was saying `I'm still here, lads, I'm a good, hard-working footballer who puts in an awful lot of effort and I'm still here'."

Nor is this merely calculating revisionism. When Darcy was 19, this reporter wrote a piece about Aughawillan and their Connacht championship match with Roscommon's Clann na nGael, then regular All-Ireland contenders. It ended in a draw. Darcy played wing forward and kicked frees.

Later in Gay Prior's pub in Ballinamore, in answer to a question about his footballing ambitions, Darcy bluntly stated that it was his ambition to play for Dublin.

(Because of a fear that he was speaking under the influence and would get into trouble - to say nothing of a self-serving desire to protect the rural integrity of the work - Darcy's youthful admission went unreported.)

He has spoken about how when the Connacht trophy reached Ballinamore, he had handed it to his father because "it was his home town not mine". Up on the platform, Darcy observed everything with diplomatic reserve.

"Players were all crying and jumping for joy. I didn't go delirious. My father went delirious and just grabbed the cup and shook it and went mad, let his emotions run and that's the way it should have been but it should have been me. Aughawillan means so much to me, but it's not home. Home is here."

So Declan Darcy arrived on the Dublin scene although he still plays his club football in Leitrim and his father is managing Aughanwillan this year. His first competitive match ended in NFL defeat by Sligo. After manager Mickey Whelan walked out in November, Darcy had to deal with a second manager within a few months of coming aboard. Tom Carr, who took over, would recognise Darcy's struggle to assert an identity. As a player Carr had to convince Kevin Heffernan of his ethnic purity after playing for Tipperary minors because his parents had moved out of Dublin.

Dublin has brought Darcy a freshness he was losing when travelling to Kells (a halfway house between Leitrim and its Dublin-based players) for training. The physical nature of his job in his father's construction business meant he was well worked by the time he got into the car and travelled to training.

Returning home late at night, he would grab his sleep before getting up the next morning to pile into work again. It was all taking a toll. "It's left me faster and stronger," he says. "I'm in bed at 10.30 and do more practising with frees. There's no more fatigue."

In return, he brings to Dublin his single-mindedness and a calmness that enabled him to kick pressure points for Leitrim in 1994 and above all, last year when London were within two minutes of eliminating Leitrim from the championship. Darcy converted a controversially-awarded penalty to push the match into extra time and Leitrim survived.

In Dublin the ability to convert championship penalties occupies the same level of wonder as alchemy and Darcy's presence (although it is not clear whether he or Jason Sherlock will have the responsibility) is reassuring.

"Free-taking is 90 per cent concentration and 10 per cent ability," says Darcy. "I never let pressure get to me because if you do, it'll destroy you as it has destroyed certain players. It's more important to me to do well in general play. Free-taking isn't the first thing that comes into my mind, like a natural free-taker. It's an extra tool in my box and I can deal with the pressure."

Because of the festival of high culture in Croke Park last weekend, Darcy was unable to gain access to the pitch for the purpose of practising his frees. Tomorrow will be his first match at headquarters since a NFL match against Dublin just after they had won the All-Ireland in 1995.

Having trained himself rigorously while in San Fransisco over that summer, Darcy was focused completely on the match against Dublin. So much so that when a bang on the back earned the recommendation of a doctor that he absolutely should not play that weekend, Darcy ignored the advice.

He played well, but at a price and was to spend weeks and weeks on his back on the floor of his parents' house. A collapsed disc was suggesting strongly that Darcy might never play again.

"Ever since, when I think of it I'm reminded how lucky I am to be still playing."

At the 1994 All Stars, he asked Charlie Redmond would he be accepted into the Dublin panel. Charlie said that if the management accepted him, the players would. A third party to the conversation, Down's Ross Carr, was shocked that anyone would even think about switching county.

"But Ross Carr wasn't listening to what I wanted."

Hard as it was for Frank Darcy, he listened to what his son was telling him last year. "I think my transferring was a disappointment, but he could see it was what I wanted and didn't stop me. He just wanted to make sure I knew what I wanted to do.

"There's been times when me and Kenneth (his younger brother) have said to him: `We're Dublin people, we're Dublin lads'. And he's looking at us, thinking `no, you're f***ing not'."

But they are.