Croke Park without tears. The fat lady warbled. The September sun shone. The earth turned orange. Kerry had been tangoed. Gaelic football will never be the same again. Armagh won their first All-Ireland football title, beating Kerry by 1-12 to 14 points. They did it the hard way of course. After well over a century of effort there could be no other route.
Hard and old fashioned. Eight games. Four in Clones. Four in Croke Park. A gruelling Ulster championship win. It started in early May with a neighbourly feud against Tyrone and ended with comeback wins over the blue-bloods of the game, Dublin and Kerry.
It was as brilliant a finale to an epic season as the GAA could have dreamed of. Some 79,500 shoehorned themselves in to the new Croke Park expecting to see Kerry's electric young forward line switched on and ready to go. At half-time an Armagh win seemed freakishly unlikely. Kerry led by four points and were to enjoy the benefits of a stiff breeze in the second half. Armagh had missed a penalty late in the half, an injury to their morale almost as grievous as the insult posted by the Kerry corner forwards who had scored five points from play.
Armagh produced though. They conjured a goal with fifteen minutes left. That left them a point behind. They scored twice more as Kerry huffed and puffed. Finally the wilderness years ended with three blows of a ref's whistle.
"It's not the end of a long road but it's the dream we all lived for," said Armagh's inspirational captain Kieran McGeeney For the second time in a month Armagh had held on, claiming a tight game against vaunted opposition. All talk about character is ended.