IT may be only the middle of January, but the saga appears to have been dragging on forever. Now, at last, we have closure ... Conal Keaney will be a Dublin footballer once more in 2010.

And he won't be returning to his first love, hurling. Not this season, at any rate.

Keaney has confirmed to the Evening Herald that he has committed to Pat Gilroy's football panel for the coming year, having only finalised a decision in his own mind over the course of Tuesday night/yesterday morning.

Anthony Daly had made a strong and doubtless compelling play for the services of Dublin's most in-demand dual exponent. But yesterday, the capital's hurling supremo got the news he had been awaiting -- if not the answer he craved.

In many respects, this is no huge surprise. Keaney first shot to prominence as the brightest young star in the Sky Blue hurling firmament but, having briefly juggled both codes, all his inter-county energies have been devoted solely to football since 2005.

Moreover, he resumed training with the footballers last week -- a strong signal, in hindsight, of his eventual destination.

But why stick with the footballers now, just as a season of major squad upheaval and uncertainty beckons? And why turn your back on the persuasive Daly, given that the forecast is far brighter than it ever was during Keaney's first coming as a county hurler?

Those questions shall remain unanswered for now, as the player doesn't want to comment beyond the above confirmation.

However, media speculation suggesting he had been dangled the carrot of football captaincy is understood to be well wide of the mark ... and perhaps in response to those very reports, the Dublin management announced last night that Paul Griffin has been reappointed skipper for a second year.

After plenty of soul-searching, Keaney has obviously decided that he still has something to offer the Dublin footballers and that Dublin football retains the potential to satisfy his All-Ireland ambitions.

The prospect of him playing both codes in 2010 has been floated in recent weeks, but it's perfectly understandable that he should stick with one.

Back in 2004, when he was better known as a hurler, he tried combining both ... with mixed results, a red card for the hurlers against Westmeath leaving him suspended for two rounds of the football qualifiers.

Six years on, the inter-county ante has been upped even further and the demands on Keaney's time, not to mention his mental and physical energies, would have been immense.

No one knows this better than the player himself. Between September 5 and November 22 last year, he featured in 15 club championship matches for Ballyboden St Enda's -- eight for the footballers, seven for the hurlers.

It reads like a schedule from hell, one that professional soccer players would even baulk at ... but Keaney kept ploughing on regardless. He was a key man as the 'Boden hurlers completed their Evening Herald Dublin SHC 'A' three-in-a-row. He was truly inspirational as the footballers won their first senior crown since 1995.

Keaney started 14 of the above 15 fixtures. The odd game out was the last one, as a depleted Ballyboden were ambushed by Garrycastle in their Leinster club football semi-final.

Keaney had been confined to bed with a bad 'flu for most of that week, and simply wasn't well enough to start. He only appeared for the last 10 minutes, with the game already drifting away from the Dubs.

Part-time 'students' of human physiology might well blame this untimely illness on the hectic schedule that preceded it. Either way, in his absence we got a true measure of Keaney's importance to Boden's big ball cause.

Anyone watching his majestic first half display of ball-winning, chance-making and score-taking against St Jude's -- in the Evening Herald Dublin SFC final -- already knew this to be the case.

Then there are the stats. Back in April, laid low by the mumps, he sat out Ballyboden's SFC first round clash against St Vincent's -- they lost.

The southsiders duly blazed a trail through the back door, with Keaney starting their next seven outings en route to the Dublin title -- he tallied a phenomenal 2-41, including 2-21 from play, in the process.

For his heroics he was named Evening Herald/Dublin Bus Footballer of the Year.

It may well be a case that Keaney's prolific club form has ultimately convinced him to stick with the footballers.

A different story was doing the rounds in the grisly aftermath of Dublin's mortifying display against Kerry last August. Even though he scored a second-half consolation goal, his own performance had mirrored the team's collective malaise.

As Dublin tried to make sense of that 17-point meltdown, there was widespread speculation that Keaney was poised to call time on his football career and sign up for Dalo's small ball revolution.

Now that he has decided otherwise, Dublin's ever-demanding fan base will be hoping that he can deliver more consistently at the business end of the championship.

COLLAPSE

In fairness, 12 months previously, Keaney had been one of the few Dubs to play anywhere close to potential during their 12-point collapse to Tyrone, when he scored 1-1 from play.

But there is a sense that as he heads towards his late 20s, Keaney has the raw material to take his game to a higher level. He isn't the quickest but he's a powerful ball-winner and a prodigious striker off his favoured left boot, from play and placed balls.

It's now a moot point how quickly Keaney would have readjusted to inter-county hurling. And maybe he will yet make that choice at a future point -- he is, after all, a few years younger than Shane Ryan and has continued to play club hurling at a higher level than the Naomh Mearnóg clubman.

Having coaxed Ryan from the football camp last autumn, Daly has now seen several other talented hurlers disappear in the other direction of this Dublin 'dual' carriageway.

He won't have Ross or Rory O'Carroll, and now he won't have Keaney either. It's a considerable blow as he seeks to bring Dublin to the next level ... but at least the Clareman knows now and can plan accordingly.

The truth is that, even though the hurlers' graph under Daly has pointed steadily upward over the past 12 months, they still can't hope to match the box office appeal of their football counterparts.

In choosing the latter, Keaney has signed up for the more glamorous gig but also the more pressurised one.

This promises to be a season of difficult transition, as Gilroy embarks on his much-touted revamp, with absolutely no guarantees that it will yield short-term results. But, having made his call, this dedicated servant of Dublin GAA deserves the best wishes of all supporters (be they big ball diehards or small ball fanatics) in his pursuit of the holy grail.

- Frank Roche