Donaghy admitted yesterday he had flirted with retirement after the All-Ireland final win of 2014 and may also have packed it in at the end of 2015, but for the sense of “unfinished business” which he felt.

I came back with a bit of unfinished business, the fact that I was dropped for a final and it didn’t go well for us,” the 35-year old told RTÉ.

“I felt I wanted to come back and give it another good shot and ended up giving it three. But the last four years have probably been up there with the most enjoyable of my career. I was playing, I was fit, I was healthy. It felt like bonus territory.”

Becoming a crowd favourite among followers of the green and gold had a lot to do with his outlier style. Donaghy was keenly aware of such.

“I’m a basketballer playing football,” said the four-time All-Ireland medal winner. “It’s a role that there weren’t too many other fellas doing.

It gave us a different option. There were times in my career when it worked very well but there were also times when it didn’t work.

“When it works, it’s good, and it’s an exciting brand of football. The people of Kerry have a real warmth with me because we were playing that way, there were high balls going in and I was managing to get my hands on a few of them.”

As he wrote in a poem which appears below: “I did my job well, in the air I’d attack”.

A little poem for ye. Thanks for everything @Kerry_Official pic.twitter.com/WIxl985gkL

— Kieran Donaghy (@starryboy14) September 11, 2018

Both Éamonn Fitzmaurice and Mike Quirke believe Donaghy possesses the skillset to succeed on the managerial front, although Quirke, who soldiered with him on the basketball court as well as the pitch, is not sure if this is an avenue he wants to explore.

In Gaelic football, guys seem to get a lot of similar [coaching] all the way up the line. When you are dealing with basketball players from different set-ups, you are picking up a lot of different stuff from a lot of different people. Kieran is clever enough to see the things that work really well and implement them into football,” said Quirke.

“We’ve spoken this year about different bits and pieces and clearly, his head is in that kind of space where he is looking at the game in a different level to what he was five or 10 years ago. Whether he goes into management down the line, I wouldn’t put it past the guy.”

Said Fitzmaurice: “He has the personality to go into management. He is the ultimate team player, has a strong appreciation of the team dynamic, possesses a great tactical understanding of the game and, most importantly, is brimming with ideas. I can definitely see him successfully managing Kerry teams in the future.”

Quirke would have roomed with the full-forward before All-Ireland semi-finals and finals in Dublin and recalled how the player he was a groomsman for never had much interest in sleep, even on the eve of such important fixtures.

“He was an absolute nightmare to room with. Sleep was not very interesting to him. He had music blaring. You’d get out of the lift after having grub, you’d start walking down the hall and you’d hear the music blaring.

The guy would be watching television until 1 or 2 in the morning the night before an All-Ireland. It didn’t knock anything out of him because that was his routine and that is what he did.

Donaghy’s outstanding achievement, according to Quirke, was the manner in which he shrugged off an indifferent underage career and, in 2006, set about shaping the game of football “for a five to 10-year period”.

“He wasn’t a guy who was being touted as a real big football guy. He was around the place, doing nothing, I suppose, and playing basketball. It is an amazing story.

“If you think back to 2006 and 2007, every club team in Ireland was searching for the biggest kid in the parish to throw him in full-forward and were bombarding ball in on top of him.

“Stephen Cluxton changed the role of the goalkeeper, Donaghy changed the way football was played for that five- or ten-year period. Everyone was trying to play the game like Kerry, everyone was trying to find a Donaghy.

“It was his competitiveness to get better at what he was doing that really made him who he was. He was a great fielder but wasn’t a good kicker, but he worked and worked on the latter. He is so competitive. Whether it is football, basketball, a game of cards or a round of golf, he seems to be that little bit more insatiable than everybody else.”

The three-time All-Star book-ended his inter-county career, according to Fitzmaurice, by re-energising an ailing group in 2006 and inspiring a new group in 2018.

Jack O’Connor, manager when Donaghy burst onto the scene 13 seasons ago, described him as the ‘Bomber’ of his team.

In the four games before Longford [in 2006], we scored no goal. In the next four games, we scored 11 goals.

“We scored four goals against Longford and Kieran was involved in all four, such was his influence. Kieran provided us with a new focus.”