AS the sun quickened to fall behind the hill on Darragh Ó Sé’s illustrious career, his natural successor seemed born, not made.
In 2008, into the panel had come a young man from Kerin’s O’Rahillys whose name carried instant weight.
David Moran was at that stage still ‘Ogie’s son’. He would make his championship debut off the bench that year, having led the county’s U21s to All-Ireland glory with a succession of dominant displays.
The seniors were back-to-back All-Ireland champions but from their first night back at training ahead of the new season, they sensed a difference around the place.
Ó Sé had soldiered for 15 years in the green and gold. When he won the last of his six All-Irelands in 2009, he bowed out at the very top.
They all remember the night Moran took a skelp from Ó Sé during a tackling drill. In his self-titled book, Colm Cooper would recall how this young buck, keen to make an impression, was given “a right clip” that “seemed bang out of order”.
“Ah sure Darragh was as wrong is the day is long,” admits his brother Marc.
Moran’s reaction to the slap?
“Not so much so he could say, he was on the flat of his back,” smiles Darran O’Sullivan.
“He got a right skelp. It wasn’t a case of get up and swing like a clown or be moaning. He got his bang, training was halted, but the next night he was in there doing the exact same thing, being a pest, going up for ball, throwing his own weight around.”
With the shoe now on the other foot, the grizzly veteran showing the ropes to Diarmuid O’Connor among others, it’s hard for those that know him to imagine Moran taking such a jagged-edged approach to schooling his eventual successors.
Before the 2014 season in which he earned the first of his two Allstars, Moran had only started two championship games for Kerry.
Six years into his career, that wasn’t how it was supposed to go.
Injuries would slap him around the place in his early days. His ability to roll with the punches and get back up became a noted characteristic very early.
In a 2011 league game against Monaghan, he tore the cruciate in his left knee.
Just as his rehab was coming to an end, he jumped into a club training session and suffered the same injury all over again.
By 2013 he was mad for games and was brought off the bench in a challenge game against Laois in May time.
A seemingly innocuous challenge led to him tearing half the retina in his right eye. They worried, as he did, that his vision might never properly return.
But it did. And by the following summer, Kerry were feeling the benefit.
By the time they met Mayo in the combustible All-Ireland semi-final replay down in Limerick, Moran had quickly established himself.
That afternoon he had 47 possessions. He won nine kickouts. By contrast, no Mayo player touched the ball more than 19 times.
At 24, it was a coming of age.
When Aidan O’Shea started throwing his weight around before the ball was thrown in on the 2019 Super 8s game between the sides, Moran didn’t budge.
To this day, the clip will pop up at least once a week of the two sets of midfielders going at each other until Sean Hurson decided the only way to separate them was to throw the ball in anyway.
“David stood up to them and set the tone for Kerry that day, that they weren’t gonna be thrown around the place. Every other player reacted accordingly,” says Marc Ó Sé.
O’Sullivan described him that year as “Kerry’s captain in everything but name”.
When they lost their All-Ireland title to Dublin in 2015, the Kerry team headed into a process of overhaul.
Gradually the team that had been broke up and as Moran came towards his peak years, he was thrust almost accidentally in the role as the team’s father.
The leaves of the mid-noughties team browned and fell away around Moran over a period of six years, but the fresh bloom was known to be on its way. That has no doubt helped make his decision to stay easier.
Perhaps there’s hurt there too, and legacy issues.
Turned 33 in June, he’s a husband to Sinead and a father to young son Eli. There’s a busy job as an accountant in Tralee. Life is catching up.
Yet there’s no sense of a man who’s held on too long. They’d love him to stay some more.
Without the ball, you can’t be the attacking force Kerry have been. And there’s still nobody in the county better at winning it.
“For Kerry to win the All-Ireland, they’re gonna have to get two huge games out of him,” says Ó Sé, underlining his continued importance to all that they do.
“It will be a needy area if he does go. He’s really stood up to the Dublins and the Mayos in the last few years when they’ve tested Kerry’s resilience,” said the An Gaeltacht man, who believes he could still have another year left.
His big-game performances of the last three years have, somewhat unfairly, been boiled down into mistakes and misfortunes.
Marc Ó Sé describes his 2019 drawn final display against Dublin as “an exhibition”. But it’s cruelly best remembered for coughing up the last ball along the Hogan Stand, as the Dubs flew around like angry wasps looking for it back as they tried to salvage the five-in-a-row.
Come the replay, his decision to punch rather than catch the throw-in is one he’d get away with 99 times in 100.
This time, though, he was left in a footrace against Eoin Murchan. He almost caught him early, but the gap began to increase as the Dublin man headed through to score the critical goal. Others might look at how the full-back line parted from their goal, or the goalkeeper on the shot, but the blame all came down on their midfielder.
Cork were 0-13 to 0-11 down in extra-time last year. Moran took Kerry’s final two shots and dropped both short. The Rebels went the length of the field and scored 1-1 off them to deliver a sickening blow.
“The way I look at it, in those game-defining moments, who was the fella looking for the ball? It was David,” says O’Sullivan, steering the debate a different direction.
“Who’s the fella willing to take on the responsibility to go again? Everyone makes mistakes, you make 10 of them every game.
“If it comes to the last kick of the game at the weekend or in a final, would David stand up to take it? He will of course, and you’d back him to take it because he’s that type of player.
“If there’s an opportunity there, he’ll be the first man calling for the ball, which is a great trait.
“He’s not going to shirk the responsibility and let somebody else at it. He’ll take on the pressure kick.
“That’s why he is who he is.”
