All-Ireland SFC Final/Winners' reaction: The winning man is not flustered. Hair still combed, brow free of sweat, jacket still zipped. Minutes after delivering Kerry a smooth All-Ireland title, Jack O'Connor looks about as giddy as a man who has just been out walking his dog.

Self-contained when he took the post in the wake of the Páidí departure, he remains so after what has been a very fine hour. No over-the-moon stuff. O'Connor has seen enough football over the years to know his eyes were not deceiving him. In his heart, he knew his team would be hard to stop.

"To be honest I could because we saw in Fitzgerald stadium over the past few months there was a big performance in this team. For some reason the critics picked on the bad part of our displays - that we were slow starters or what not, but no team will dominate for 70 minutes."

He drew up a game plan - free of frills and with no real obligation to Kerry's tradition for flair and beauty - and waited with patience and belief for it to work. The long high ball, he felt, would undo Mayo.

"We just felt that because the Mayo inside forwards are small, maybe their backs would not be all that used to high ball coming in at training. We decided to check it out." Even the western county's early goal did not perturb him.

"We have been in that situation before - we had Limerick getting a goal after 10 seconds, Derry getting on around the same five- or six- minute mark. It got the Mayo crowd buzzing for a while but I was not overly worried because the lads kept playing away. The old maxim - never look at the clock. And they kept kicking the points and pulled away."

And in doing so, they crafted scores that were vintage Kerry. By the end, the intrigue was not in the contest but in where the performance ranked in modern green and gold lore.

"Well, I think it must be the best Kerry performance in the last 20 years," Séamus Moynihan evaluates, his right leg immersed in an ice-bucket.

"That was the best I have seen from a Kerry team anyhow. It was very basic and tight and it absolutely worked a treat. Mayo couldn't cope with the high ball at all, it was alien to them. We got so many scores from high ball coming in. And the great thing was that guys like Colm Cooper were catching it over their heads."

Moynihan's evident pleasure in the unadorned nature of this latest Kerry triumph seems the key to their attitude, as if there was something cleansing in the Spartan purity of their performance. It was blistering and aggressive and direct. Old-style.

Cooper's goal married the best of that direct approach and the irrepressible gift that Kerry players have for producing spellbinding scores. What pleased the management most was that it came from the agreed class of ball - a high kick thumped from deep, dropping and waiting for a forward to win it.

"I must have said 20 times that Colm Cooper in the air is as good as what is around, "says O'Connor. "Colm Cooper is as good as what is around in the air pound for pound as anyone around," he repeats.

"He is fantastic. I told the lads to check him out early on. They had a young fella on him - Geraghty - and I wanted to see what he is like. And Colm was as brave as could be - he took it in the air and kept going - he has a nose for goal as well. He went around one or two players and just stuck it. As I said, this man is a genius on the field and he made it look easy. I think he side-footed it in the end."

Again, it falls to Moynihan, the father figure, to put the flame-haired youngster in a historical context. "Maurice in his day had it all and Colm is so young, I haven't seen a guy as much natural skill since. The goal - the dummy he gave just before he kicked it was incredible. He gave an exhibition."

Dara Ó Cinnéide stands in a corner of the dressing-room, the big silver cup on the bench beside him. The Gaeltacht man is the latest keeper and enjoyed a fine afternoon as part of a marauding full-forward line. After the disappointments of the last three years, he pauses for a moment to consider the game from Mayo's perspective.

"You knew exactly what the Mayo players were trying to do and it wasn't working out for them. And we have been there, seen days like that. I wouldn't be too hard on Mayo.

"I saw Ciarán McDonald try this beautiful pass and one of our fellas just got a hand to it. And we were delighted but you could see what he was trying to do. And it was that type of game when everything went wrong for them."