A handful of aces usually wins. This could have been a story, it really could, it could have been a tale of long shots and high odds and big stakes and a little romance. This could have been Cork's All-Ireland. From comrades to champions. Movie stuff, writes Tom Humphries at Croke Park

A handful of aces usually wins, though. Kilkenny prevailed. The house won. Then they shut down the season. Turned off the lights when they left. "Thank you and good evening," they said.

Kilkenny didn't care much if it was pretty or exciting or had a twist of romance. Those things are for saps and sportswriters. They came to win. Everything else was gravy. Eddie Brennan and DJ Carey were effectively held in custody by the Cork corner backs as the match went on. Kilkenny just looked elsewhere. Cork, for their part, hit innumerable wides. So many from good positions that after a while it became hard to maintain sympathy with them. To have closed down Kilkenny to the extent they did and then squander all the possession seemed criminal.

So, it turned out how we knew it would and if yesterday's closing chapter had passages which were banal, well at least it held our interest. In scooping the pot, securing the double of minor and senior for the second year running, the newly minted double double, Kilkenny established themselves unimpeachably as the game's leading franchise. Nobody does it better.

Oddly, it was the very ordinariness of the game which underlined Kilkenny's extraordinary capability. Cork, as one suspected with príomh oide Ó Grádaigh in charge, had their homework done. They closed Kilkenny down in as many spots as were possible.

They pressured them in the areas where Kilkenny were young and tender. Kilkenny survived without playing very well.

"As a team they blocked, they hooked and they hunted," said Brian Cody afterwards. It was as blue collar as that.

"There was nothing soft got in there," said DJ Carey, for whom the cauldron must have seemed like blessed relief after the long week before it.

It was entertaining between times but odd visions and bizarre sights along the way yesterday threatened to sour us. An umpire reached for his flag to signify a Setanta Ó hAilpín point only to accept a petition from James McGarry in the Kilkenny goal and put the flag back again. Referee Pat O'Connor seemed at one stage to signal a Cork penalty but changed his mind. Diarmuid O'Sullivan caught a ball football style and then charged Lomu style and was awarded a free out.

And for the last minute or two of the game the Croke Park scoreboard had the wrong score posted. That's before we get started on the Celtic Tenors and Croke Park's insistence on outlawing communal singing on big days.

It wasn't an afternoon for swashbuckling heroes. No one player took the game by the scruff of the neck and rode it for 70 minutes. We thought Tommy Walsh would. Tullaroan's latest issue of wonder scored an extraordinary point after just seven or eight seconds of his first All-Ireland senior final. By the time he had popped over his third from play after 15 minutes he wasn't just leaving Cork players in his wake he was leaving a vapour trail. We thought we would call it the Tommy Walsh final and place it somewhere near the Thunder and Lightning Final.

Tommy waned, though, distracted and not quite fit and marked for a while by John Gardiner whose own story fascinated for different reasons. What do you do when you are asked to mark a firecracker like Tommy Walsh while your own game is going through a crisis? Hailed as one of the sweetest strikers to have come out of Cork in an age the poor man went home (or into some kind of programme) with a personal wides tally of five and a scoring tally of zero. Being asked to mark Tommy Walsh in the midst of such agonies must have been like escorting a prisoner while knowing the bailiffs are at the door back home.

Cork didn't score from play until the 35th minute, a point from Timmy McCarthy so surprising the soporific umpires they never even raised a flag until urged to do so by the referee. By then Kilkenny were well ahead having hit seven unanswered points. It was going so well, in fact, they almost forgot to get keyed up for the second half.

By then the goal was crying out for a Cork goal. It came only after the longest drum roll in history. Setanta Ó hAilpín, the game's first genuine matinee idol, began doing quite a lot of damage to the Kilkenny full back line.

His technique is simple. With the ball in his hand he is as unpredictable as a fox in a hen house after a feed of magic mushrooms. Rather than wait and see what he might do the Kilkenny defence fouled him every time. Joe Deane cashed in each time.

Little by little Cork clawed their way back into the game. Then 18 minutes into the second half somebody forgot to foul Setanta. He grabbed a ball, beat off the challenge of Noel Hickey, and slipped it home.

Game level! Enter Niall McCarthy, heading for the twilight zone. He hit a fine point almost from the puck-out to put Cork in the lead. The next ball came to him and he hit it high towards the far post. It struck the wood and came back. A few seconds later, in space again, he drove the ball goalwards off his strong side. Wide this time. He'd put Cork ahead but missed the chances to put them three ahead. By the end of the game he could consider himself lucky not to have been sent off but it is those misses which will haunt him.

McCarthy knew that might be expensive when Martin Comerford popped his fourth point of the day with 12 minutes left.

Ah, Martin Comerford. His cameo was perhaps the most influential. Gorta ended his own little famine yesterday. Scoreless in the semi-final and contributing modest amounts before that he knocked on more yesterday than he had managed all season. 1-4.

The goal was no beauty but any green flag raised in the last 10 minutes of an All-Ireland has got to be memorable.

Cork pressed hard towards the end. Seánie McGrath was introduced and his touch and elusiveness were sufficient to make one regret we haven't seen more of him lately.

JJ Delaney, so mature all summer that he seems too large for the wonderkid cape, moved back and suppressed Setanta.

Cork kept pressing, though. 79,383 people sweated in their seats. Time ran out before our interest did. Three points the margin. The cup goes to Kilkenny today and to Gowran tomorrow.

"It's the pinnacle," said DJ. Something apt about that as an end to the year. "Our backs were savage. Martin Comerford did ferocious work. We're not quick starters and we got going on Cork early on and got a bit of a lead."