Preview: Novelty shown door as historic final looms

At the end of the most engorged, most 'open' championship in years, we wind up here again, with Dublin and Kerry.

When Kerry last beat Dublin in an All-Ireland final in 1985, most journalists and pundits were wearying of the same old pairing.

In advance of this year's semi-finals, it was telling that this was the decider most desired by neutrals, save for in Ulster.

Today's game has the feel of an epochal clash.

A Dublin team who may - may - be approaching the twilight of their dominance and a Kerry side seeking to reclaim their perch once and for all.

During the apocalyptic years of the late 2010s, there was a widespread view that Dublin would be winning All-Irelands in perpetuity and that going forward the benighted entity known as the rest of Ireland would be lucky to squeak a couple of them a decade.

That the capital city, with its vast human and financial resources, had at last created a Gaelic footballing high performance unit and a talent production system which your average county team had no hope of matching.

Those fears have abated somewhat since. All it took was a couple of All-Ireland semi-final slip-ups. It's also become apparent that the succeeding generation aren't quite tearing up trees compared to the class of 2013, aka, the '93s.

The phrase 'golden generation' became a contested one during this time with the rural doom-mongers insisting that this crop in fact represented the new normal: get used to it. As of 2023, this viewpoint appears less credible than it was.

The core of said golden generation - the players born in 1993, Jack McCaffrey, Brian Fenton, Ciaran Kilkenny, Paul Mannion - are either fast approaching 30 or already 'the wrong side' of it.

The goalkeeper is so far the wrong side of 30 that he's now the