It was a day for cool heads and limiting the mistakes. It was a day for the fans to get soaked and the players to deliver.
It was a day for tactics to be torn asunder by a slippery ball, then revisited and tried again.
Never give up.
An All Ireland Final is all about the teams, and the fans, and the managers and the stadium and so many different factors. No to experience one is to miss out on a huge cultural and sporting element of our culture and what we are.
Hill 16 is a safer and more structured place than it was when I first experienced an All Ireland Final on it’s crumbling steps in 1983.
These days you have to be there on time as they close off the sections so as to avoid a crush. That’s fair and it has not taken away anything of the buzz that comes from being part of a Dublin win.
Perfect strangers become perfect friends for an afternoon then break up to go their separate ways, enriched by a moment of shared human experience and joy.
Every reference to the Hill from a player or from Daithí O’Sé is greeted by a cheer. The man in blue stands up on his barrier and the man with the football head starts to wave his flag.
It’s not all Dublin these days but for most of the Kerry and Tipperary fans that were there the fun was all around them rather than on the pitch.
There were only four points scored into the Hill yesterday. No magic Mac goal to set the place truly alight. And yet it felt special.
Sure we couldn’t get any wetter so hanging on for the presentation and the run towards us was never in doubt.
Every All Ireland win feels like it will the start of an era of dominance, and yet that rarely happens so everyone needs to enjoy the moment. The losers will be back, the winners as well, probably, but that was what everyone thought in 1995 as well.
Three wins in five years is a huge achievement for Dublin. They have already matched the great Dublin team of the 70’s but need two more to match what Kerry achieved between 2000 and 2009.
Players these days worry only about the moment, and the moments that make up a match. Reflections on history come after they have finished.
They are though the spurs that drive the fans to keep coming back, the young players to keep going to training and the whole mad glorious circus to keep rolling week after week and year after year.
Commentators may say it was or wasn’t a game for the ages or a season to remember but to be there, to be part of a national family of sporting fans makes it special year in year out.
The focus now switches to the women of Dublin and Cork next Sunday and to the Club Championships that mean even more to many than the high days in Croke Park.
