Saturday's game has the curious feel of an All-Ireland semi-final with an asterisk.
Even in rude health, Tyrone would be underdogs this weekend, given what transpired in the league game in Killarney back in June.
As it is, their Covid-afflicted build up (and Feargal Logan's account of the extent of it) has left people with the impression, rightly or wrongly, that this semi-final is merely a preliminary before the inevitable Kerry-Mayo decider.
Kerry players aren't thrilled with the five-week break. David Moran has been quoted as saying a two-week break is ideal and that four weeks is "the worst in the world." God knows what that makes five weeks. (We've seen ample evidence of the ruinous impact a lengthy break had on hurling teams under the old system, specifically the Munster hurling champions who proceeded to win six of 16 All-Ireland semi-finals between 2002 and 2017.)
Thus, Kerry might have accumulated some rust over the past month of competitive inactivity, notwithstanding those obligatory 'A v B games' ("they do be fierce hot and heavy, so they do").
Any advantage that Tyrone might derive from all this is somewhat negated by the fact that they themselves haven't played for four weeks.
One other statistical morsel which might cause a tincture of apprehension in Kerry is their surprisingly poor Croke Park record in recent years, as pointed out by Daire Walsh, with only one win in their last 10 games at headquarters in league and championship - that win coming against Tyrone in the 2019 semi-final.
Though the detail is rarely played up, the Munster champions are going for four successive championship victories over Tyrone. Kerry's tragedy, if you can call it that, is that their victories are typically regarded as the default outcome and thus can struggle to lodge in the memory and are frequently glided over. As if to prove this, years ago, the Irish Independent ranked the 25 All-Ireland football finals between 1987 and 2011 in order of best to worst - four of the top five were Kerry losses and three of the bottom of four were Kerry wins.
Kerry finally ended their irksome noughties era hoodoo against Tyrone in a sunny Fitzgerald Stadium qualifier in 2012, a game played at a time when that Kerry generation were already tipping past their best and that Tyrone generation were certainly past their best.
The hosts were rampant in the finish, winning 1-16 to 1-06.
Though it was plain that Tyrone were by now undergoing a period of transition and were a shadow of their former selves, there was still an air of catharsis at the final whistle.
Now that they finally banished their demons in the fixture, Kerry fans were inclined to be magnanimous and there was a touchingly warm reception for Mickey Harte on the pitch afterwards, graciously received by the Tyrone supremo despite the 10-point loss.
The Munster side have since won two All-Ireland semi-finals against their northern enemies, the first a somewhat forgettable rain-sodden affair in 2015, the most recent one after that stirring second half comeback in '19.
But these recent games, alas, have a limited hold on people's imaginations when it comes to the Kerry-Tyrone relationship.
There have been no great studies on this but normally, it takes approximately three minutes for any conversation on Kerry-Tyrone to degenerate into an argument about who, indeed, was the team of the noughties.
This truly is one of the old perennials, almost on a par with "Did Seamus Darby foul yer man (Tommy Doyle)?" or "who ratted on Tony Keady?"
One wouldn't want to get drawn too deep into that minefield again. Suffice to say, Kerry plainly have the statistics on their side, though if winding up Kerry football fans is your thing, then arguing otherwise on this score is one of the surest known means of achieving this. It's probably safe to say that the fact that they failed to overcome Tyrone 'when it counted' is a mark against their legacy... oh no, we're getting drawn down that rabbit-hole.
The whole mythology around the fixture is entirely based on those noughties encounters. As far as Tyrone were concerned, Kerry's reaction to the three losses was just a bad loser tendency disguised as purist disdain, most famously epitomised when Pat Spillane, in full-flow, decided to transform the word 'puke' from a verb into an adjective on live television.
Kerry, meanwhile, found "the northern crowd", as they tended to be referred to, rather hard to stomach, as evidenced by comments about the "nouveau riche" and hypothetical laments about having to go set-dancing three nights a week.
Kerry's beady-eyed suspicion of Tyrone survives to this day, as Darragh Ó Sé acknowledged in his Irish Times column this week.
Tyrone's handling of their Covid-19 outbreak and their impressive act of brinksmanship with Croke Park has naturally provoked a degree of wariness down south.
"Nobody in the GAA is more ready to see conspiracy theories in what Tyrone do than Kerry. That's just reality," Ó Sé wrote, though he was keen to stress that he took a "more fair-minded" view than your average Kerryman - presumably one who doesn't have a column to file for a national audience.
It all indicates that while the noughties might be a long way in the rear-view mirror, the legacy of that time still hovers in the background of any Tyrone-Kerry encounter, reinforcing mutual suspicion.
History has taught Kerry, in particular, to be watchful and many aren't ready to presume they'll meet a ragged and under-the-weather side on Saturday.
Are we ready to see a new narrative in the Kerry-Tyrone rivalry?
While Kerry supporters are impatient to see their skilled young flyers get 'All-Ireland No. 1' under their belt, Tyrone have continued to regenerate themselves, copper-fastening their reputation as Ulster football's most consistent modern powerhouse.
After their humbling in Killarney, they were mightily impressive en route to the Ulster final, admittedly with the help of Michael Murphy's red card in the semi-final in Ballybofey. With coronavirus already beginning to break into the camp, they held off Monaghan to notch their 16th Ulster title.
When they get in the swing, the Ulster champions play a very fluid and flexible brand of football, with their wing backs and wing forwards now almost completely inter-changeable.
In his appeal to Croke Park two weeks back, Feargal Logan said the extra week would leave them "in a position to be competitive".
How competitive they'll be given all their turmoil is open to question this weekend.
Tyrone have been stuck in a bit of stasis in recent years, often getting as far as the semi-finals but falling well short on arriving there. Their one final appearance in the last decade arrived after a scrappy victory over Monaghan and ended in a fairly conclusive defeat to Dublin, the closest the latter had to a stroll in a decider. All told, it didn't add mightily to Tyrone's reputation, in comparison with previous seasons.
Whether, under new management, the Ulster champions have the wherewithal to make the next leap remains to be seen.
But there's enough weapons in the arsenal to suggest they give Kerry another headache.
If they're in the right condition, that is.
