Seán Moran/On Gaelic Games: The day after his team's All-Ireland success Tyrone manager Mickey Harte gave an interview in which he again emphasised the responsibility of everyone to learn something new every day.

And it was striking to hear him, rapping out the word, eyes blazing with intensity, and think it's less than 12 months since most of us first heard him delivering the same thoughts in the damp confines of a press box in Omagh.

As coach of Errigal Ciarán he had embarked on a preliminary odyssey with his club. It was to include three tilts with Crossmaglen Rangers, defeat of defending All-Ireland champions Ballinderry - Harte must be the only manager to have relieved two All-Ireland champions, club and county, of their titles - an Ulster title and a narrow loss to eventual winners Nemo Rangers.

That day in Omagh the Tyrone champions had been steeped - literally given the accompanying monsoon and figuratively - to survive the first match but their battling qualities were perfectly plain. So, too, the manager's articulate convictions. Harte's has been a massive achievement. Tyrone football was in disarray a year ago after Art McRory stepped down as manager for health reasons and his colleague Eugene McKenna was messily overlooked in the succession stakes.

In the recent past the county had departed the championship after a demoralising defeat by Sligo and needed momentum from somewhere. Harte's credentials had been established with All-Irelands at minor and under-21 level. The senior club feats with Errigal Ciarán pushed his candidacy forward at an opportune time. It also probably closed the deal. After all although many All-Ireland winning managers have already achieved success at under-age - for example John O'Mahony, Paidí Ó Sé and Peter McGrath - not all successful under-age managements can translate it to senior.

Within the last 12 months, for instance, in hurling three All-Ireland under-21 winning managers have left their senior positions after only one season. Harte has made the transition smoothly and comprehensively with the bulk of his winning team already having had success at under-age level.

What has been constantly impressive is the forceful rationality he applies to post-match analysis. When it was exuberantly suggested the Ulster replay rout of Down had been "the complete performance" Harte calmly said that performances were never complete, that something new was learned every day. The team that had romped through the replay was the same team that had been on the brink of losing to Down and Derry. Greater consistency was needed.

All year he has been on message. On Monday he introduced the importance to the team's preparations of the National League, which Tyrone won for the second year running last May. The ability to win league and championship has been more commonly achieved in hurling than football but it has also been a sign of a team without a demanding championship schedule.

For other counties spring success has tended to spell doom for later in the year - explicably so given the need to get up for a final in May makes it hard to focus on some must-win confrontation a few of weeks later. The qualifiers have changed all that. Seasons are longer and competitive schedules busier.

The notion of a championship run consisting of a handful of winner-takes-all matches is waning and the need for a team to pace itself is gaining acceptance.

Tyrone's lengthy season owed much to the two replays they had to play. Those matches filled out the programme so that only prior to the All-Ireland had they the sort of break - five weeks - that used to be taken for granted.

In the modern game finding a comfortable rhythm will become more important than the old blood-and-thunder training routines designed for the sort of primal struggle, which only one side used to survive.

Tyrone found that rhythm and Harte pointed out that the team never played any challenge matches. Two nights training per week plus regular competitive matches proved sufficient for a high standard of fitness. Other teams may well consider following suit.

In other words looking down at the league may have become passé.

In the rush to acclaim Tyrone, there should be words for Armagh. Taking an All-Ireland defence to the last few minutes of the championship in this age of qualifiers is a Herculean task. For a team that has always laboured to win easily it was even more demanding. Joe Kernan's managerial acumen had already been proved in this sort of territory with Crossmaglen, whom he took to three All-Irelands in four years in a championship every bit as hard to retain as the intercounty equivalent.

To have lost on the basis of Conor Gormley's finger tips - however legendary that block will now become - must have been agonising, notwithstanding Tyrone's clear superiority.

But Kernan and his captain Kieran McGeeney showed the class to which we have all become accustomed in their downbeat but generous responses to Sunday's defeat.

Less impressive has been some of the guff circulating about Ulster football and its perception elsewhere in the country. There's a difference between criticising the entertainment value of football and a team's ability to play. No one questioned the finalists' ability and it was commonplace for them to be referred to as the best teams in the country.

No team will sacrifice results in pursuit of the aesthetic and no team is seriously expected to - but you can't have it both ways. Efficient football played by footballers capable of better is a reasonable assessment of the final.

Both the Tyrone and Armagh teams have responded to the criticisms in a relatively measured fashion and neither has been associated with the more strident allegations of bias against Ulster. But other voices haven't been so restrained.

Cantankerous references to some of Meath's victories totally ignore that two of those All-Irelands, 1988 and '96, were followed by wildfire controversy that greatly peeved the county and in which few punches were pulled. But Meath got on with it without the need to grumble about an anti-north east midlands agenda.

Before the 1990s Ulster teams weren't always good enough to win All-Irelands. When they weren't, no one was patronising although whoever beat them were generally polite about it. The same went for Connacht teams and when Kerry were in full flight, for Leinster as well.

The wheel goes around. Ulster football should relax and enjoy the spin.