Seán Moran On Gaelic GamesAll-Ireland finals are frequently the reference point for an entire year, never mind the specific championships to which they bring a conclusion.

Last Sunday the 2007 hurling season ended much as it had begun and much as it had been expected to finish, with Kilkenny champions. Nonetheless, just because you start and finish in the same place doesn't mean you haven't travelled anywhere.

The only anticipated detail that didn't come to pass was Waterford's absence. Limerick people have found intensely irritating the long faces and words of disappointment that greeted their unexpected defeat of the Munster champions and National League winners, but it would have been fascinating to see how Waterford would have performed had they reached a first final in five attempts, given that they would probably have been underdogs and under relatively little pressure - though who in retrospect would have wanted the deeds to the house riding on Kilkenny losing a rerun of the league final?

But like his Clare team of the 1970s, which couldn't get over the Munster-final hurdle, Justin McCarthy's side got stuck once more, this time on the penultimate obstacle, and were deservedly defeated by Limerick's most exuberant display of the summer.

There was an odd postscript to a memorable season with the sideshow that developed between Brian Cody and Ger Loughnane. The Kilkenny manager was probably correct that the original allegations of borderline conduct against his team were a function of gamesmanship in the run-up to the Kilkenny-Galway quarter-final, but he'd be wrong to think that just because Galway weren't playing at the weekend the same motive didn't apply.

Cody's sustained outbursts have reminded people of Loughnane's 1997 attack on the RTÉ panellist Eamonn Cregan during the Sunday Game coverage of the Clare hotel after the All-Ireland final defeat of Tipperary.

In terms of proportionality Loughnane's comments were more extreme - and he later apologised just as he acted to try to defuse last weekend's controversy - given that Cregan had ventured nothing more controversial than to question the quality of the match.

But the more precise parallel lies some weeks previously that summer when Loughnane made similar comments about Wexford's physicality before their semi-final with Tipperary.

At the time Wexford were favourites to meet Clare in the final so laying down a marker would have made sense. In the long game that Loughnane is playing, such markers obviously still have their appeal.

One of the consequences - intended or not - of the row has been a distinct lack of focus on a couple of ugly incidents in Sunday's final: Eddie Brennan's jab with the hurl that left Stephen Lucey requiring stitches and Noel Hickey's pull on Michael Fitzgerald.

You can say the season's over and it made no difference but with Cody breathing fire over slights on his team's sportsmanship neither media nor administrators were likely to have much appetite for probing Sunday's lapses in discipline.

Anyway, given the number of incidents that have routinely escaped scrutiny this summer it would be an almost hostile act to investigate the players in question.

The weekend saw a satisfying championship head for a predictable conclusion. Outcomes determine nearly everything. It's harder to watch a match recording once you know the result, and when you try assessing the year, the significant data comes from the winners.

Similarly once the postmortems are written up it's all too easy to lose the sense of the possible that ran in a thin seam through expectations of any All-Ireland final. Even against an imperious Kilkenny there remained for the challengers a possibility, and the tremendous noise that rose from the Limerick supporters on Sunday was indeed, as Stephen Lucey ruefully suggested on Monday, the sound of an audience in search of a performance.

Maybe it's understandable in the grip of a supremacy such as Kilkenny currently exercise but there have been a few attempts to rationalise the team's status, as if underplaying the achievements makes it easier for the rest of the counties to cope.

This is the first time in six decades of hurling that a county has won five All-Irelands in a decade, and the odds at this stage would suggest that for the first time in GAA history - football or hurling - a sixth title in a decade is a possibility.

Already Kilkenny are even money to do so, round off the three-in-a-row and ascend into first place on the roll of honour in 12 months' time.

There have been some protests that the system benefits Kilkenny, the dysfunctional Leinster championship allowing the county out with hardly a scratch, but the phenomenal record has been assembled regardless of the system in operation.

It's true that next year's reversion to direct access to All-Ireland semi-finals for the Munster and Leinster winners will be an undesirable advantage, but over the past three years, regardless of the provincial championships, the same eight teams have presented themselves in the quarter-finals.

In the past two years Kilkenny have at that stage had to play Galway, a task that regardless of the big difference ultimately on the scoreboard would not have appealed to any of the other counties in the hat.

Last year Galway had been All-Ireland finalists the previous season, and this time around, despite an otherwise chaotic championship, they gave their best performance against Kilkenny and under Loughnane's management had been expected to mount a big challenge, which for 60 thunderous minutes they did.

The flip side of the argument is that for all the reality of Wexford's inability to test Kilkenny seriously, they were still able to pose an unanswerable test for Tipperary.

The champions' strength in depth gives them a panel that enabled Cody to perform a spinal transplant on the team midway through an All-Ireland final.

But rather than treat that resource like some cruel trick of nature, others ought to look at the developmental work that goes on in Kilkenny, with 450 kids being tutored within the development system on an annual basis. The current senior panel didn't fall out of a tree.

Two friends of mine watched the weekend's final together. One is from New York and for him the whole occasion was something of a novelty. The other is from Limerick and he was desperately hoping for some novelty. Shortly into the match the former laconically remarked to the latter, "Your problem is that the other team is better."

And that's it in a nutshell.

l smoran@irish-times.ie