LockerRoom: There are blips and aberrations but down the days and the years the football championship unfolds as a relentless exercise in Darwinian proofs. The farther up the food chain you are the less chance you have of being somebody else's dinner.
Here in Leinster, the Dubs are the kings of the swingers, the jungle VIPs. Wander a little farther afield though and Kerry are everybody's natural predators.
Yesterday they devoured us again. Not easily. We weren't eaten without a struggle. They took us like a python devouring a plucky mongoose. But when the sun went down Kerry were sated and Dublin had vanished.
Yep, there are blips and aberrations. Kevin Heffernan mainly. Since Dublinmen began playing for Dublin teams the Dubs have beaten Kerry just twice in championship football: once in 1976 and again in 1977 (when Tony Hanahoe had put on the bainisteoir's bib and a couple of other bibs as well). That's it.
Yet Dublin's entire football history over the last half century or more has been defined by the challenge of Kerry, a challenge expressed succinctly in Heffernan's maxim that an All-Ireland where you beat Kerry along the way is a double All-Ireland.
The further we get from 1976 and 1977 the more audacious the achievements of that time appear. Heffernan's passionate belief that the benchmark of excellence in any team is how they fare against the green and gold was born of a minor semi-final defeat to Kerry and the landmark trauma of the 1955 All-Ireland final where Dublin's cerebral and scientific approach was blithely disrupted by the catch-and-kick merchants of Kerry.
1955 was the year the revolution in Dublin football took hold. Including that fateful September, though, the sky blues have played Kerry 15 times in championship football since then. 1976 and 1977 remain the only two wins. Yesterday we came up short yet again.
By this morning the memories will seem blurry like a hangover. Croke Park was buzzing yesterday with that high-voltage energy special days bring. The game itself was tough and thrilling and confounded those suckers who are paid to make predictions or offer analysis.
Dublin will benefit from a generous appraisal of their courage yesterday but this was a game which desperately needed to be won and should have been won.
If you are to take down Kerry, the modern version that is, the time to do it is in the year when they have lost Séamus Moynihan and Michael McCarthy, the year when the Gooch looks a bit flat and the day when Darragh Ó Sé spends more than half the match in the repair shop.
The time to do it is the week when Kerry appear to have picked the wrong team. And that's certainly how it appeared.
Pádraig Reidy, lambasted and rocked by the trouble he found himself in against Monaghan, looked likely to get lollipopped. He survived.
Dublin would have hoped Mark Vaughan would torment Reidy until the doubts cracked him. They tested the notion early. Right string. Wrong yoyo.
Few thought Séamus Scanlon was up to partnering Darragh Ó Sé (let alone holding the fort against Ciarán Whelan, as he had to do yesterday). He was given another run and lasted the 70 minutes.
Eoin Brosnan looked to be in trouble too against Monaghan. He rewarded those who gave him a reprieve.
And Kieran Donaghy appeared to be hurting for want of the intelligent supply Seán O'Sullivan offers. Seán Bán didn't arrive in until an hour was almost up yesterday but Donaghy was thriving in a different job by then.
And Tom O'Sullivan looked against Monaghan to be a full back ripe for the plucking. Yesterday his feathers and plumage were unruffled.
Dublin should have taken Kerry but, but, but . . . as they say in Vegas when a man gets up with all the change after playing a few bad hands, he wanted to give his money away but the cards wouldn't let him.
Kerry pulled this out through thinking and composure and improvisation. Dublin lost it for lack of ideas. The facts are cruel. Most marginal refereeing decisions yesterday afternoon went against Kerry. At least two-thirds of the attendance wore blue jerseys. Kerry's talisman went off crocked after 20 minutes. And yet late in the game when Dublin had the momentum and closed to within a point as Conal Keaney cashed a free it was Kerry who believed.
It was Kerry who had the class and the invention. A movement down the right wing involved an endless string of passes before the ball was ferried across to the left and found Declan O'Sullivan. At the moment Declan's boot is golden. He scored the point which closed the game down. You could only shake your head in wonder.
It was a remarkable display of confidence and patience by Kerry. Waiting and waiting and waiting as the clock ran down. Waiting and waiting and waiting till they found the right man with the right piece of space.
And so it was done as coldly as an incision with a scalpel.
For Kerry the score gave them the pass into their fourth All-Ireland final in succession and the sixth since the clock flipped over into the new century. If in Dublin our memories are distorted by the glorious abundance of the Heffernan era so too in Kerry judgments are skewed by the lingering glow of the golden years.
Kerry's achievement over the last decade in this time of improved competitiveness must rank alongside anything in the county's history. No county has come close to sustaining such a run at the top table.
How Kerry do it is something of a mystery. Their underage system isn't one other counties study in the hope of duplicating it, whereas Dublin, to take a topical example, have been relentless and assiduous in the cultivation of talent, plucking players from the development-squad system (and the county hurling team) in a ruthless drive to get enough good players to carry them over the line. Again they came up short yesterday, though, and four Leinsters in the last six seasons have failed to yield even a single All-Ireland-final appearance.
Kerry just seem to know the game the way the Aboriginal knows the red earth of his home. Doing the right thing under pressure never looks like a learned trait for Kerry players. Dublin always look to be held together by the bolts and rivets of training-ground learning. In the white heat something always seems to pop. Little things went wrong at vital times yesterday and Dublin in the end looked overschooled and mistrustful of improvisation.
Thus the city moves into a new phase of famine. The 1958 All-Ireland win against Derry ended a 16-year gap without a title but in that period the game in the city had flatlined and then been revived by the Dublin-players-for-Dublin-teams policy.
The 1955 final was perhaps the high-watermark and 1958 was a belated consolation for that trauma. Dublin won again in 1963 and the next barren era, an impossibly dark time, lasted till 1974.
The Heffernan successes ended with the 1983 final, and if it took a dozen years for four of Heffernan's pupils to guide Dublin to another success, at least the gap until 1995 was shortened by four All-Ireland final appearances.
Next year though it will be 13 years since a Dublin team appeared in an All-Ireland final. Leinster titles no longer matter to anybody except the most self-deluding.
Dublin were brave and defiant yesterday. When they were six points down in the second half the corner men could do nothing but hope to coax the vigour back into their legs and the hope back into their hearts.
Dublin answered the call and came out for a final round. They were gallant and relentless but it wasn't enough.
Thirteen years since an All-Ireland final appearance and in the city the game is still thriving and these big Croker days are house-full theatre regardless. So, does it matter? Has failure somehow made a success of our home?
Failure has to matter and the fading memories of 1976 and 1977 have to be retained as proof of the possible. Those days bequeath a modest inheritance of swagger to the next generation of Dubs.
We don't always have to be prey! Do we?