All-Ireland semi-finals come at you fast. It’s just three years since Kerry beat Derry in front of a crowd of 43,192 to make the 2023 decider. It wasn’t quite the ultimate grim-death Kerry-Derry game – that came the following year in the quarter-final – but it was still a grind in an almost exactly half-empty stadium. The contrast between then and now couldn’t be starker.This weekend, for the first time ever, Croke Park will put up the Full House signs for both All-Ireland semi-finals. Louth and Mayo on Saturday, Kerry and Dublin on Sunday. Two rising teams bouncing up to HQ harbouring all flavours of hopes and dreams one minute, the sport’s two alphas hunkering down for battle the next. The perfect mix.If that all sounds a little excessively expectant, it’s not without reason. The best Dublin v Kerry games of the past 15 years have all been All-Ireland semi-finals. You had 2022 and Seánie O’Shea’s free. You had 2016 and the Kerry blitz just before half-time, eventually hauled in by the Jim Gavin Dubs in the sweet spot of their imperial phase. You had the six-goal thriller in 2013, immortal and pure, a balm for misty-eyed football people who gather in quiet corners of old houses.For counties with such a famed rivalry, the see-saw tends to go through long enough periods sticking up one side or the other between these two. Kerry and Dublin have met 33 times in championship. Though the score stands at 18-12 to Kerry with three draws, Dublin have only lost once in the past eight meetings. They went 34 years without a win in the fixture and followed it with 11 years undefeated. In fact, the two counties are in the middle of a sequence together for which you need to go back over a century to find a parallel. The first three games between these two were in 1893, 1906 and 1909 – won by Dublin, then Kerry, then Dublin. That held as the only time in the history of the GAA where either team went win-loss-win (or loss-win-loss, if you prefer) in the fixture, right until the 2023 final. If Kerry win on Sunday, it will be the first time it’s ever happened between them that four games in a row have alternated outcomes.Kerry are favourites, for this and for the whole thing. They got their scare against Tyrone and saw it off down the stretch by applying the tidal wave of their bench reserves and the sinewy intelligence of their game management. For maybe the first time since he arrived on the scene in 2018, Kerry look like a team that would still win an All-Ireland if David Clifford had to ring in sick. No wonder Jack O’Connor stayed on.Dublin manager Ger Brennan. James Crombie/Inpho They meet a Dublin side that feel like they’ve been reborn in the space of a month. It’s hard to fathom that they’re the same group who were beaten by Louth in front of 16,160 lost souls in Croke Park just 40 days ago. Had you informed the people around you that day that both teams would be back for a couple of sold out All-Ireland semi-finals a few weeks down the line, you’d have been warned not to be stopping for any more drink on the way home.[ Ger Brennan drawing on past lessons to inform latest instalment of Dublin-Kerry rivalryOpens in new window ]But Ger Brennan has wet-nursed key personnel back into action and spruced up his oldest soldiers. It’s fully six years since either Con O’Callaghan or Niall Scully won an All Star but they’ll be right in the mix this time around. Crucially, some of the newer breed seem made to last – if the likes of Charlie McMorrow, Eoin Kennedy and Seán Guiden can put down roots, the Dubs will get more than just this weekend out of them.Maybe it’s too early for that crop to give this Kerry outfit a proper rattle. Whatever happens, they can’t afford to take a trimming. Equally, Kerry won’t be shy about giving them one. Both counties know the worth of driving the other into the dirt for a while. The first semi-final couldn’t be more different. Louth and Mayo have only met twice in the history of the championship, once in 1950, once in 2023. None of the current Louth players have ever beaten Mayo, for the simple reason that their one-point defeat in 2023 is the only time they’ve ever faced them. The counties haven’t met in the league since 1998. They have no bone to pick with each other. It is, you might have heard, Louth’s first All-Ireland semi-final since 1957, meaning history isn’t exactly on their side. Since the turn of the century, 11 counties have returned to the last four stage after a gap of a decade or more. Nine of them have lost. Their average margin of defeat has been just under seven points. Mayo, meanwhile, are old hands at this stage. Since their breakthrough in 2012, Mayo have played in nine All-Ireland semi-finals and won six. Two of their three defeats have been after replays. To put that in context, they’ve won the same amount of All-Ireland semi-finals since 2012 as Kerry. Only Dublin (eight) have won more. But sure look, these are all just numbers. And anyway, Louth can play at the numbers game too. For all the Wee County stuff, Louth actually have a bigger population than Mayo. They’ve actually won an All-Ireland more recently than Mayo too. They can do without your stat-attack, thanks.Eventually, and gloriously, the numbers all fall away and the ball is thrown in the air. A Croke Park weekend sidles into view, pregnant with possibilities. Heady times for the old game.[ Darragh Ó Sé: It’s not mind games – Ger Brennan is right about all the pressure being on KerryOpens in new window ]