All these years they waited. Twenty-eight winters and summers. Scheming. Dreaming. Waiting for the day when it would be their turn to be champions of Ulster again. Twenty-eight years, and when it came down to it, those final few seconds took longer to pass than all the rest of it put together.

When referee Pat McEneaney signalled that the waiting was at an end, the outpouring of joy was tremendous. The noise they made was deafening. "Young and old," as Martin McHugh observed, "wept together."

Trying to describe what it meant to the people of the county seemed to be beyond those players who tried to explain. But Damien O'Reilly had a handy solution to the problem when he suggested that it was hard to believe what it meant to everybody, "but come along to Cavan tonight and you'll see well enough for yourself".

What we saw yesterday, explained O'Reilly, was a new Cavan thriving on a new spirit in the county. "In the past maybe a Cavan team would have thrown the towel at it if they were under pressure like that at the end, but we've done a lot of work to get this far and we hung in there," he said.

Inside in the dressingroom, McHugh, with his two young sons at his side, spoke between regular displays of adoration from passers-by.

"I'm just happy," he beamed, "for the supporters and for all of the clubs in the county who kept things goings when the days were bad. Most of all, though, I'm happy for the players, they've been through a lot for this and they deserve it."

Reflecting on his own achievement, he said: "I think being involved in anything like this as a player is a little bit special, so Donegal's All-Ireland win will probably always be the highlight of my career, but this has to come a pretty close second."

Now McHugh turns his attention to Kerry, and the work will start today for his side with a training session for the panel at Breffni Park at lunchtime. Amongst those there will be full back Ciaran Brady, looking forward as much to getting hold of the Munster champions' attacking stars as he did to coming up against Derry's.

"All week we had it shoved down out throats about this Derry full forward line and what they were going to do to us. Well, we knew that we could do ourselves proud against them out there, and that's exactly what happened.

"The game was very tight throughout, but we never lost out heads and the goal turned it for us. At the start of the second half we got three points and I thought that we were going to win it well from there, but then we missed a couple of chances and and they came back at us. The goal got our noses up, though, and from then on there was no stopping us."

Joe Brolly, on the other hand, said simply that he and his team had played like "amateurs" while, a few feet away, Derry selector Frank Kearney agreed with Brady that the goal had been the turning point in the afternoon, and conceded that his team, on the day, had always looked second best.

"We lost it because we didn't move the ball from our 45, we played too many square balls and we didn't go at them at all. Cavan applied themselves thoroughly throughout the pitch and they took the one opportunity they got for a goal, so good luck to them, they deserve it."