In the chilling nightmares that follow every All-Ireland final defeat Kerry will wake up to nothing. No ghosts, no demons. The entire game will keep flashing before their eyes and they won’t even be in it.

Rarely has any game passed a team by like this one, especially a Kerry team. It was their lowest score in an All-Ireland final in 50 years and if the game had played on into the darkness they probably wouldn’t have added a whole lot more. Dublin would have continued to make sure of it.

It was telling that when their first proper goal chance of the afternoon presented itself the man most capable of finishing it wasn’t on the field. It wasn’t that James O’Donoghue had been playing badly: Dublin just didn’t allow him to play. Can any Kerry player honestly say they felt a full part of this game?

No wonder Éamonn Fitzmaurice greeted the defeat with a sort of wry bemusement. There was no room for any bitterness or contempt, only perhaps a little dry humour. Dublin played the entire game on Dublin’s terms, and no matter what Fitzmaurice tried to do, nothing could change it.

‘Didn’t function’

“We would have brought on 10 replacements, if we could have, but today, for some reason, we didn’t function,” said Fitzmaurice. “That can happen. You have to give a lot of credit for Dublin. But if you are going to win an All-Ireland final you have to turn up, you have to play. We didn’t.

“And I think when we look back on it we will accept that we did not function as well as we can, up front. We took the wrong options, at times we didn’t execute as well as we can. But then the better team won. Dublin had the best of both worlds. Their forwards worked so hard that when we were in possession they were slowing us down, coming out and at the same time getting bodies back, which was a very effective game-plan. We, in possession, weren’t as accurate or as clinical as we can be.”

None of the Kerry players lent themselves to any explanation afterwards, perhaps realising there wasn't one. Whether Kieran Donaghy would have been better serviced by starting may cause some lasting rumination, although it was hardly the winning and losing of game.

“I think in fairness to Kieran, he came in on a wet day and he gave us a good point to our attack,” Fitzmaurice conceded. “Darran O’Sullivan did well as well, he gave us a bit of life and energy up there. We kept pegging away, but to be fair to Dublin, every time we got close to them they seemed to be able to go down and get a point or two to keep it at two and three-points the whole time. We needed a goal.

“But I’d also give credit to the lads. I think they did well to hang in there. We weren’t playing well, we weren’t firing on all cylinders today, and the lads battled hard in the second-half.”

Real consolation

Still, three-point defeats have rarely felt more thorough. The only real consolation for Kerry was the fact they were still chasing an equalising score late on, when Dublin should have been home and dry.

“Well, if you told me this morning that Dublin would score only 12 points, I would have bitten your hand off,” said Fitzmaurice. “But yeah it is, but you can be overly hard on fellas as well, I’m actually very proud of the players, particularly with the way they went at it in the second half. We weren’t happy at half-time with the way we were doing things and the way we were playing. At least we had a go in the second half. But Dublin were just better than us, simple as. Out worked us, out thought us, out fought us and the better team won.”

There was no denying that tactically Dublin ticked all the right boxes, and Fitzmaurice also hinted that their two tough tests against Mayo ultimately stood to them. The suggestion that Donaghy may have been awarded a penalty late on was hardly entertained, because that, Fitzmaurice knew, would have meant clutching at straws.

“You get those calls some days, you don’t get them other days. We’ve benefited from those calls on other days so you can’t complain about things like this. We certainly benefited last year from the two games. You can’t replicate that intensity in training. I still felt we were very happy with the way our training went, and coming up here we were very happy with the way it went, very happy with the way our preparations went. We felt there was a bigger performance in us, but there just wasn’t.”