Well I woke up this morning (even GAA reporters get the blues) and all the champions were gone. Nearly all. Of the four All-Ireland champions who came to Croke Park at the weekend, only the minor footballers of Laois will be returning this year.

It has all been very instructive. For those of us who have been grumpily badmouthing the met office since that rinsed-out Bank Holiday, the events at Croke Park taught some Christian forbearance.

Some empathy as well: That front spreading unexpectedly from the midlands to cover the whole of Leinster. Our charts had indicated that it was unlikely to move beyond the unsettled half of the region; depression settling over south east due to clouds from north Munster proving more resilient than anticipated.

There were however talking points for lots of people and not just pundits. Here are seven.

1) Offaly. The scale of Offaly's Leinster football final triumph was immense, given their disadvantages. Wintering in Division Four and being drawn on the less taxing side of the Leinster draw gave the team no opportunity to measure themselves against top-class opposition, so their aim had to be true at the weekend. It was.

No other team has broken through from a lower division and taken as impressive a scalp as the All-Ireland champions'. No other county from Division Four has won a provincial title.

Manager Tommy Lyons's role in all of this has been paramount. Leaving aside the organisation, motivation and such other things as we take for granted in a good inter-county manager, of the reasons everyone (outside of Meath - and maybe Mayo) rejoiced is that the style of the team was so appealing.

Built on Lyons's principles with a speedy, direct, skilful and well choreographed attack, the Offaly effort also incorporated discipline and disdain for the physical as an end in itself.

2) Dublin. Tommy Lyons raises the subject of what were Dublin thinking of two years ago?

Among the several cogent reasons advanced for Lyons's disfavour within the county was the fact that as he lived in Mayo until he was about nine and thereafter on the southside of Dublin, thus doubly infringing influential theories of racial purity within the county's GAA.

Kilmacud Crokes, whom he led to an All-Ireland club title, also suffer from their unfortunate location in Stillorgan, some miles south of the Liffey, as well as from success achieved with too much reliance on untermenschen from the country (inconveniently for this theory, 10 of the All-Ireland-winning team played under-age for the club).

On top of all this, the Dublin players "wouldn't have played for him". Given the way they've been playing for Mickey Whelan, it's uncertain what to make of such a theory.

The point here is not that anyone should be growing brave post facto with Dublin two months gone from the championship and Offaly just having won it; it is that on available credentials two years ago, Tommy Lyons, as the most successful club coach in Dublin, should have been given a chance.

Mickey Whelan had been influential in Dublin's previous All-Ireland club victory, that of St Vincent's in 1976, but that was 20 years before his appointment. Maybe Lyons should clear the decks for the 2015 championship. That Whelan's claims took precedence was a gamble that could only be justified in time. Two years later, draw your own conclusions.

3) Kildare. Kildare's involvement in the epic semi-final matches has also been substantially qualified by the Leinster final. Their descent into short-passing oblivion might have been slightly redeemed by Meath's retaining their title, but even allowing for the serious and sometimes overlooked fact that Meath were fielding a second-string defence, there's no evidence to support the notion that Kildare would have fared much better, let alone differently, against the pace and precision of Offaly's attack.

4) Meath. The suspicion that resources were stretched was partly answered by the emergence of some new faces in the team, but Saturday proved that the dip in form of some players on top of the unavailability of others was unsustainable. Their matches were among the best and most exciting of the year and they provided the footballing highlights of the summer to date with sections of their performances against Dublin and Kildare. When the fall came, they were under-strength and outgunned but game to the last. Their response to defeat is always exemplary despite the shellacking they excite in some quarters over sportsmanship in general. Maybe it's because they prize winning so much that they accept it as a virtue in others.

5) The National Football League. How relevant is the league? Have teams from the lower divisions raised their game or are standards levelling? Mayo should have won last year's All-Ireland after wintering in Division Three. From the fourth division, Sligo reached this year's Connacht final, Fermanagh held Cavan to a draw and now Offaly from the same base have won Leinster.

It has long been the opinion of Carlow manager Bobby Miller that there isn't an enormous difference between any of the four divisions, but despite some good performances by his team in recent seasons, Miller's view hasn't been fully substantiated until this summer.

6) Balance Of Affection. After a momentous couple of years for hurling, is the tide turning for football? There has been a greater number of good matches this year than in any championship for a long while and just as football was delivering a popular result and some breathtaking play, hurling has gone a little nasty. Not on the pitch as much as off it where rivalries are becoming rancid and public arguments are being broadcast through the media. Public disgruntlement - albeit unreasonable and unfair on Tipperary - at being deprived of a Clare-Wexford final won't help.

7) Hurling Reforms. On this subject, an all-Munster final is in some ways a good idea in that it brings home the realities of admitting finalists from Munster and Leinster. It isn't logical to support the championship structures and complain too much about the identity of the beneficiaries, but neither is it logical to believe that the All-Ireland suffers by the progress of a clearly better team. On the data of the summer, the two best counties have qualified for the final.

Tipperary's displays against Limerick and Wexford were better than Wexford's against Offaly and Kilkenny. As for the Munster final, Tipperary - like Wexford yesterday - didn't play well, but still came closer to Clare than anyone has managed. Wexford may have been badly, even fatally, weakened by injuries, but that's hardly a new hazard of championship hurling.