Kieran Donaghy admits he was close to retirement following Kerry's All-Ireland final defeat to Dublin last September, but that doesn't mean he is approaching 2016 with any sense of it being his last season.

Donaghy, who turns 33 in March, has opted to stay on with the Kingdom for the 2016 season at least, along with practically all of his older teammates such as Aidan O'Mahony, Marc Ó Sé and Colm Cooper.

While he acknowledges that retirement was "certainly in my head" walking off a wet Croke Park as an All-Ireland runner-up last September, once he opted to stay on, his focus was sharpened and that's where his mind is as he prepares for his 11th season as a Kerry senior footballer.

"My mind is always focused with Kerry," he said at the launch of the Allianz Football League at Croke Park on Monday. 

"Sometimes, it works for you, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes, you have a good year, sometimes you don't. I don't think it ever comes down to lack of effort or lack of focus. But I will think about that again (retirement) when the time comes and I will talk to people to see what their views on it are."

Donaghy, who first came to sporting prominence as a basketballer in his youth, has returned to the game at local level in Tralee this season and he admits that has given him a freshness and a hunger for the new season, despite how close he was to retirement during the winter.

"Thankfully, whether it has been the basketball over the last three months, I just feel good in myself and in my body which is really the thing you have to weigh up most now in playing this game at the speed in which it is being played now and the mileage that fellas are covering in games," he said

"Stuff that lads have to do in training...is the body able for this? And thankfully with the basketball and the training and the individual stuff I have been doing with the Kerry fitness guys, it feels good to go. That makes the decision that bit easier.

"If I had an ailing hamstring or an ailing groin or this osteitis pubis thing I had in 2013, I would be very quick to say that I can't do this thing."

But good fitness or not, just how close was Donaghy to finally calling time on one of the most iconic careers of the modern era last September?

"I wasn't 100 per cent, I didn't go home and say this is over," he says, reflecting on his thoughts four months ago. "But I knew it was something I was going to have to think long and hard about. It wasn't a decision that was made but it was certainly in my head.

"But you know there's been people suggesting that it should have been in my head maybe three or four years ago as well. So you're just trying to weigh up and make the right decision for yourself and your family really."

In 2014, Donaghy enjoyed about as spectacular a finish to the championship season as anyone could ever hope for, emerging from a somewhat dormant summer to play a dominant role in the All-Ireland semi-final, semi-final replay and final to inspire the Kingdom to the All-Ireland title and win an All Star.

Captain then for 2015 after his club Austin Stacks won Kerry and Munster honours, Donaghy had dreams of lifting the Sam Maguire as captain for Kerry last year and he admits that had he found himself climbing those steps last September to lift the trophy, it might have made a prospective retirement decision much easier for him.

"Can it get any better?" he admits he would have asked himself last year. "If I come back, you're never going to have as good as winning it as captain. I just felt that it probably would have been a nice time to go if that result had went the way it did. But it's almost the way it didn't go that made this decision easier and make this decision a lot easier for me to go again. 

"If you were coming back after winning it two years in a row and being captain the second year...two in a row is quite hard to do and three in a row is nearly impossible, it hasn't been done since 1986. You'd kind of be looking, you'd have to endure another losing final which are hard to endure."

Certanly, for all Donaghy knows about winning All-Ireland titles, he knows about losing them as well. He has suffered three All-Ireland final defeats with Kerry, the most recent two to Dublin (2011 and 2015) and last September's defeat to the All-Ireland champions was Kerry's third championship loss in a row to Dublin, when one throws in the 2013 semi-final loss.

That's the first time Kerry have lost three championship games in a row to Dublin in their history, and like it or not, Dublin's dominance is starting to loom large in the story of the current Kerry team. Yet Donaghy bristles at the suggestion that Dublin's current sway over Kerry could be a psychological issue for them going forward, in the same way that Tyrone seemed to have the mental edge on Kerry during the 2000s, beating them in their meetings of 2003, 2005 and 2008.

"Am I concerned about it? It is something I would have preferred hadn't happened, that they won three in a row. But does it concern me? No, it doesn't," he said, definitively.

Kerry face Dublin in the Allianz League opener at Croke Park this Saturday evening, but Donaghy dismisses the suggestion that Dublin's recent record of success over Kerry would dominate his or his teammates' thinking ahead of the encounter.

"No, no we wouldn't be thinking like that going into a game, whether we play them in the league or championship this year, we won't be thinking that they have beaten us three times," he said.

"It is absolutely pointless and a waste of energy. All we would be thinking about is who we are playing, what their strengths are, what our strengths are and how we are going to beat them - we can't be thinking about what happened previously.

"Any of the sports psychologists would be turning in their grave if we were thinking about something that happened four years previous - something that happens after the event, that's the second time in a row, third time in a row but it is not something that you will be thinking about coming up to the game."

Whatever about Dublin, whatever about retirement, Donaghy is back for more in 2016 and he seems firmly assured that he has made the right decision to go again. As he says himself, the dream ending is rare.

"I don't think you can go the unfinished business route, you just don't get it (the perfect ending)," he said. "Darragh (Ó Sé) got it in 2009, Séamus (Moynihan) got it in 2006, Alan Brogan got it last year. It's rare that you get this ideal ending," he says, but one senses that that's exactly what he craves this season. 

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Kieran Donaghy was speaking at the launch of the 2016 Allianz Football League in Croke Park on Monday. Division I champions Dublin face Kerry in the curtain-raiser under lights in Croke Park this Saturday.