After all the fuss, the hurling season reduced itself to simple things in the end. Cool heads. Experience. The confidence that comes with momentum. Kilkenny did enough to win their 28th title. Cork did enough to feel that they might have thieved it.
At the end of a week when the mores of tabloid Ireland threatened to drag the jewel of sporting Ireland into the gutter, yesterday brought nothing but damp squibs. The orgy of tat threatened for yesterday's Sunday red-tops never materialised. Neither did the classic hurling encounter we yearned for.
Kilkenny, easily the pre-eminent team in the game, yesterday duly won a quirky match which held the attention but never begged to be categorised with the classics. Cork, a side which began the hurling year on strike over their county board's parsimony, finished it by splurging with 18 wides. They go home muttering the time-worn phrases of sporting regret. Would have. Should have. Could have.
Changed times. These two counties once played a final in such adverse meteorological conditions that it is still known as the Thunder and Lightning final and the memory of it in some minds virtually obscures that of the outbreak of the second World War some days later.
Yesterday was tropical and while Kilkenny's superstar captain DJ Carey was tabloid prey all week, Cork were able to field Setanta
O' hAilpin, the game's first living breathing sex symbol.
Setanta saw more ball and scored a goal upon which the game might just have hinged but Carey had the last smile in what has been a long turbulent season for him.
His old club mate Charlie Carter withdrew from the panel and the captaincy earlier in the summer. Then Carey was involved in a high-speed car chase and became the victim of a tabloid frenzy concerning his private life. All this as the season reached its climax.
"I kept away from it," he said afterwards about the off-field business of last week. "There was a lot of stuff going on around me. I can't make a comment because tabloids have put themselves into a position where they were offering money all over the place and I just don't want to say an awful lot more, but when you go and offer big money to make up a big story, it lowers a lot of things."
He spoke while his two sons played on the dressingroom bench behind him and the All Ireland trophy sat unattended on the physio's table.
Yesterday's All Ireland medal was Carey's fifth and, as he lifted the trophy, the stadium shook as the crowd chanted his name. A middling match but an affirmation of what is important about the game and a restoration of due dignity.