All-Ireland Hurling Final:THERE IT ended. Another abortive drive for five. Four is apparently the natural limit on human greatness. Kilkenny stood at the gates of history and found them padlocked against them. Tipp leapfrogged into the record books with a passionate and joyous performance.

There were 81,865 at Croke Park yesterday to watch a game which, amazingly, lived up to the expectation which preceded it. Tipperary ended Kilkenny’s remarkable dominion and did so in some style, hurling like demons but extracting four goals with surgical finesse. Kilkenny went down like great champions. It is a testimony to them that even when it was impossible for them to win we still thought they might win, so great and elemental was their pride.

“Sport is sport,” said Brian Cody philosophically afterwards. Cody had created this Kilkenny team and led them to the frontier of history yesterday . He was as admirable in defeat as ever he was in victory. “The best team won the All-Ireland. That was comprehensive. Tipperary were excellent.”

It rained of course, but that was an irrelevance. To be in Croke Park yesterday was to be drawn to a piece of history, it had the cachet of the great event. And from the time the national anthem was sung there was a fervour on Jones’s Road that made you feel everybody in the stadium was part of this towering piece of theatre and there was another audience watching us all in wonder. Watching and surely envying.

“Three years on this journey,” said Tipp manager Liam Sheedy, “lots of highs and lows. I always said we would learn from the lows and appreciate the highs. We saw today what this team can do and how they have developed. Coming second last year didn’t do a lot for anyone. Today we felt we were in a good position. Five-in-a-row bring pressures on groups.”

Tipperary are champions again, their first glory since the Nicky English babies of 2001. In some counties nine years is a gap between titles, a pause between celebrations. In Tipperary it is a famine. Its end was celebrated appropriately

Conversely it is 2005 since Kilkenny last experienced defeat in a championship game. On that day they haemorrhaged five goals and in the years of their dominion since then it was always felt goals, and goals alone, would undo them. Of course saying that lots of goals would undo Kilkenny was as facile and obvious a thing to say as observing that only a cure for the common cold will cure the common cold. There is no cure.

And Kilkenny don’t concede goals. Yesterday Kilkenny conceded four goals though. Each one contributed a little more to their undoing. The breakthrough for Tipp came after just nine minutes, the first goal of Lar Corbett’s collection. The score left Kilkenny five points behind, and though they briefly drew back to level early in the second half, Tipperary stitched two quick goals into the game and ended it.

Henry Shefflin had left the field in the 13th minute, a respectful round of applause form every corner of the house marking the departure of the game’s greatest star. His knee had betrayed him in the most innocent and harmless of circumstances and Kilkenny got no lift from his leaving. It would have been better had he been assassinated by a Tipperary back or had to leave the pitch roaring but shaking his fist at the boys to go and win one for the Gipper

Instead one moment he was there and the next he was gone and without Shefflin Kilkenny seemed oddly lacking in invention thereafter. Every attack had the same stolid style to it ever after it became clear that it wasn’t working. So even as the game fizzed and cracked exuberantly it was always moving away from the champions.

“The goals don’t really come into it,” said Corbett, whose hat-trick most definitely did come in into it. “It’s what Liam said at the beginning. It’s all about work-rate. Noel McGrath had the hard work done. He had a handy point on, could have hit it over. Handpass. Bonner Maher was on the flat of his back on the ground. Gets a handpass. It all comes down to the hard work. Liam would come to me after matches, no matter what the score was. ‘Larry no hooks, no blocks’. That’s what we are built on.”

Indeed you could see it from the start yesterday. Last year hooking and blocking was perhaps the one area where Tipp were deficient. Yesterday they performed both of those destructive arts to perfection. No cause was a lost cause. Every challenge was backed up by passion and hunger. Kilkenny’s decision to lay almost everything straight down the middle meant they we replaying in a corridor of intensity. It was a strange and jarring sight to see so many Kilkenny men fail to get the ball away crisply or at all, so many shots launched in unlikely loops from the backfoot position.

Backfoot. It might have been the word they wrote on their hands. They never let Kilkenny stand as tall as they can. When Tipperary were putting their game plan together with such perfect precision they can hardly have imagined it would all unfold so well. Kilkenny never led on the scoreboard. Kilkenny never got an easy breath on the field. Tipp’s time.

At the end the Tipp contingent sang Galtee Mountain Boy, a song about the old flying columns. It seemed perfectly appropriate.