I t wasn't long after the European Cup semi-final of 1995/96 that the late Sandy Heffernan, secretary of the Leinster branch, got a call to hurry along to 62 Lansdowne Road for a meeting with a couple of the IRFU heavyweights.

It was a period of some flux in rugby. The game had gone professional only a few months before, and the way it had happened it was as if those who had been trying to hold back the tide were still thrashing around, pitchforks in hand.

The purpose of the meeting was to give Heffernan a bit of grief over his decision to pay Leinster's players what they were owed after a campaign that had finished against Cardiff on a truly foul day in Lansdowne Road in front of a crowd of 7,500. At Ir£300 a game for a three-match campaign, it wasn't a hill of beans.

"I remember being admonished by Dr Syd Millar and the late Ken Reid for paying the players so soon," Heffernan said, some years later. "What did he expect us to do? They were playing against fellas who were being paid."

It wasn't so much a question of 'can't pay won't pay,' as 'can pay but would really rather not.' The irony was that the man on the end of the lecture was a fully paid-up member of the conservative club himself.

As gradually the interest levels began to rise in these games and match programmes moved beyond an A4 sheet with the squads listed on one side and not a lot on the other, the same Sandy was a reluctant participant.

Coincidentally, when Leicester came to Donnybrook a year later for the first European meeting between the teams, he reacted badly to the suggestion of the then PR man that the programme should include a feature on one Martin Johnson. "But it's our match programme," he protested. "Why would we want an article about one of the opposition?"

From the match programme and the presentation of the match itself, to the amount of cash going into the trousers of those who play in it -- Leinster players get over €1,000 for every European match win on top of their fat salaries -- we are in a country unrecognisable from the one we inhabited back then. And only now are Leinster arriving on stage.

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If your impression of Leicester Tigers is that they have always been on the top floor of the English game, then you wouldn't be far off the mark. Take the 1970s as your starting point, when TV came to rugby through the BBC's Rugby Special programme, and by the end of that decade the Tigers were starting to dominate the landscape.

Up until then, they would have been ranked third of the midlands' big clubs behind Coventry and Northampton. In those days, the John Player Cup was the only prize on offer -- instead of a league there was a merit table -- and once they got to their first final, against Gloucester in 1978, they never looked back.

The man who tuned them in to the idea of excellence was Chalkie White. Coaching back then was almost frowned upon in some circles. It was an era when the captain took responsibility for virtually everything, from being the sole communicator with the referee to working out the tactics and then leading the charge.

White wasn't just part of a new breed however, he was also very good. "He was very much ahead of his time in his coaching and his values and his commitment," says Bleddyn Jones, a Leicester legend who joined the club in 1969. "He got the respect of all the players even though he was viewed with some suspicion by the hierarchy there at first."

White listened more than he shouted and his success at making training more enjoyable had positive implications for how the team played. And in turn, how they recruited.

The success started with three cup wins in-a-row from 1979 and by 1984 their dominance was such that they were supplying seven players to the England team that beat Ireland in Twickenham that season. They won the league too, when that was inaugurated in 1988, and yesterday's win over London Irish was their seventh Premiership since then, with two Heineken Cups thrown in.

In those early years with White, they knew they were building something special, and that the players would come. Loughborough College would become a rich pipeline, carrying Clive Woodward among others to Welford Road, and the attraction was simple. "The word got round that if you joined Leicester you'd have first-class coaching and a better chance of playing for England," Jones says. "It was a bit controversial at the time when Dusty Hare left Nottingham to come in 1975 but he really started the ball rolling."

And seemingly not for a wedge either. When Les Cusworth left Moseley to join up, he was crossing the county boundary from Warwickshire to Leicestershire. They only paid him mileage when he crossed the border, which was the last few miles of his journey.

Dusty Hare is still involved there. As is Peter Wheeler, former captain and now chief executive, and Pete Tom, former player and long time chairman. Everywhere you look in the club there are people in positions of power who came up through the ranks. Five of their 10-man board of directors are past players. They have gone outside for coaching help, from successful Australians Bob Dwyer and Pat Howard to, less successfully, Marcelo Loffreda and Heyneke Mayer, but significantly their most bountiful period came under another home-grown Tiger, Dean Richards.

Even when they weren't the leading club in the midlands, they had the biggest club ground in the country. To fill it now they just open the gates. By the start of next season, the capacity of Welford Road will go up from 17,000 to 24,000 with the redevelopment of one stand, and the 10-year plan is to have a 30,000-capacity stadium.

Currently, they have nearly 13,000 season-ticket holders who provide 30 per cent of the club's €18.9m turnover. The new stand will have banqueting facilities for 1,000 bodies on match day, and with conferencing options when the Tigers are not at play.

"We think our conference and banqueting business will grow within a couple of years to €3.3m turnover," says their managing director David Clayton. "We have planning permission to redevelop the entire stadium and have purchased additional land to put in a multi-storey car park. It's been a consultative process all along and the city recognises that in addition to the jobs we've created, when we travel in Europe, it is Leicester we are representing."

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Back in 1995/96 when Leinster were European Cup semi-finalists operating out of a portacabin in Donnybrook, the Tigers were not even in the competition.

They were, however, better tooled than most for the demands of professionalism. The proof is in their position now: this game is about turning their fifth appearance in a final into their third win, which would lift them alongside Toulouse.

Leinster's journey has taken them down a few more unapproved roads. Some of those diversions have been caused by the IRFU, who were doing the navigating, and were also paying for the petrol. The idea of our provinces being 'clubs' and having a degree of autonomy is still fairly new in Irish rugby, and the remarkable thing is that we are now in sight of having the third of our big three added to the list of European winners despite the different agendas.

Leinster's awakening on the field started under Matt Williams. He had come in initially as assistant to Mike Ruddock but he always had the look of someone who wanted the chance to take over and run things his way. Ruddock had had the hardest job: trying to chart a course in those early years when the IRFU didn't want to travel anywhere, and by the time Williams took over in 2000, there was more acceptance to the idea of change.

And he was good at that. Coming from a country that was in love with professionalism compared to Ireland's loathing of it, Williams had a good handle on the fundamentals of running a full-time operation. He cleaned up some of the daft bits about how the players prepared and moved the whole thing on.

By the end of his three years though, it had run aground. Still there were elements of the operation that were accidents waiting to happen, and the administrative cock-up over the eligibility of Felipe Contepomi for the pool stages of the 2003/04 tournament was just one of them. Williams needed someone to manage him, and Leinster needed someone to get them a plan that covered everything, including a home they could decorate and call their own.

And what did they get? Two coaches in two years, that's what. First, Gary Ella displeased the senior players and got the heave-ho, then Declan Kidney jumped ship after one season, and the fall-out from that was toxic. From the moment that story broke here on the night of their tame defeat by Leicester in April 2005, Leinster went into a tailspin. It was the 10th anniversary of professionalism and Donnybrook may as well have been Dubrovnik.

Enter Michael Cheika, an unknown coach with a mandate to develop young talent. He parked that quickly enough in favour of buying in help. Some of those purchases were repatriations -- Leo Cullen and Shane Jennings -- and some from south of the equator, like Chris Whitaker and Rocky Elsom and CJ van der Linde, all of whom were worth the money even if Van der Linde has run into injury trouble.

In his four years on the job, Cheika has worked assiduously at it, from toning down his attacks on referees, which encouraged a culture of victimisation among his players, to getting some consistency into the performances of top-quality players. And they are top quality.

It was interesting that while Eddie O'Sullivan was getting it in the neck for failing to whip some cream from Ireland's best ever crop, Michael Cheika was excused the same criticism even though he was cooking with comparable ingredients. Things have changed around him though and it's a pity that Contepomi won't be on the field on Saturday to sign off on it.

"Leinster has been one of the teams that has grown the most, as a club, in Europe," the Puma says. "If you see the attendance, the amount of supporters, the way they travel. The infrastructure -- when I first arrived, the gym was not even a portacabin: it was a shed with holes. It looked like a Second World War shed. Now there's nothing to envy in any other team in Europe. The gym is perfect, the stadium we have, as a club, has grown and there is still loads more to do, keep growing, lots of potential."

Indeed. You'd wonder what Sandy Heffernan would have made of it all.