GAELIC GAMES: God had a walk-on part in yesterday's thundering Croke Park drama. As cameos go it was significant. As miracles go it was business as usual for Peter Canavan.

Armagh and Tyrone were level as the game lurched into injury time. Tyrone won a free, the referee's whistle inaudible beneath the cacophony of noise which was shaking the big house.

Seán Cavanagh, Tyrone's precocious midfielder, grabbed the ball. Owen Mulligan, who had been taking the frees on that side of the field, had the ball in his hand. Cavanagh went straight to the only certified divinity on the field. He petitioned.

"It was me. I went up to him and said, 'Please, please, Peter. Take that.'" And he said, 'No, Muggsy is all right for the job'. And I said 'No, you take it Peter, it's the last kick of the game. There's no one else better to take it.'"

Canavan offered unto Mulligan the ball and Mulligan smiled a broad smile and shook his head and by the multitude the gesture was understood to mean, "Are you mad, Yahweh? I'm young and I'm blond. I don't want to die."

And thusly the greatest drama of the footballing summer was ended by a routine kick executed in fraught circumstances. "It was right and fitting," said Mickey Harte reverently.

Tyrone walked away with the laurels. Armagh fell to their knees. It was always going to be so. The losers leaving on all fours, the winners on tiptoe.

This was an All-Ireland semi-final for the annals. An epic which exhausts the capacity of cliché. Language is insufficient to describe the intensity and passion of the game. It is not enough to use threadbare phrases like white heat, juddering excitement, molten passion. You had to watch and listen and just absorb it.

It was football but not as we have known it. Purists will carp but that's what purists do (and that's what makes purists so tedious), but Tyrone and Armagh have not just brought each other on, they have brought the game of football on.

Two teams often criticised (and sometimes rightly) for their manners gave the most honest performance seen in Croke Park for many years. They laid themselves bare before each other. They made errors but they didn't spare themselves in an effort to avoid venial sins. The pace, the honest physicality, the athleticism - these things took the breath away. Some of the scores were wonderful and the defending at times was awesome.

Tyrone accessed another All-Ireland final on a day when just two of their starting forwards scored from play. Armagh restricted Mulligan and Stephen O'Neill to a point each. Still they lost.

That won't be the keenest of their regrets as they wake up this morning. Armagh were two points ahead with seven minutes to go. And they lost. They took the lead like men grasping Excalibur with 11 minutes to go. And they lost. They didn't concede a goal from play. And they lost. For a period in the second half their dominance from kick-outs was such that it seemed as if they would run away with the game. And they lost. A sorrowful mystery.

Armagh lost having picked themselves up out of the dust on several occasions. When O'Neill buried a penalty with gleeful aplomb not long before the break Tyrone were three points ahead. Kieran McGeeney, the soul of this Armagh side, surged downfield and from the right touchline almost posted a point over. It was the last score before half-time and it was defiantly heroic.

And then midway through the second half you began to wonder if Joe Kernan had forgotten to perform the customary morality play in the Armagh dressingroom because his men seemed to be wilting. Steven McDonnell had been living so comfortably off the little scraps Ryan McMenamin had dropped from the table that Ciarán Gormley had moved on to him. McDonnell was discombobulated, briefly missing two chances, the second a howler. Game up, we thought.

Just a minute later, though, a ball dropped out of the sky behind Gormley's too-eager fingers and into the arms of McDonnell. Gormley and Pascal McConnell converged at speed on McDonnell but somehow he got bespoke boot on leather and steered the ball to the net before disappearing under 25 stone of Tyrone beef.

Armagh to win, we thought. And they lost.

Tyrone won't shed any tears on their neighbours' behalf. Their heroic comeback in the final minutes may only have covered a distance of three points but in the context of these games that's a thousand miles. Barefoot. On hot glass. When they'd already walked that distance already this season.

That Armagh should have been the victims of a mild case of larceny balances out the karma from the Ulster final.

Those two games, and the searing rivalry between the counties, gave yesterday's game a context which lent the occasion weight and heat.

Tyrone left no doubt that they'd spent much time recently looking back in anger. "You have to give a lot of credit to Armagh," said Ryan Mellon afterwards. "They got the Ulster title though. We were a bit disappointed by that. We wanted this one really badly today."

"Talk about a thrilling game. It was the sequel to our two previous ones," said Mickey Harte. "I have to say total credit and total respect to Armagh. They put us to the pin of our collar. We've taken the best out of each other. It was good for football and good for Gaelic games."

In the corridor linking the dressingroom football men hugged and cried. On the field people still danced and outside on Summerhill and down through Ballybough a convoy of Tyrone cars was gridlocked but happy. Horns blew and flags waved and grown men yelped deliriously.

"People are happy," said Harte quietly. "But there's no cup to show. We got through a semi-final. Kerry did the same thing a week ago. There wasn't such celebration. Let's remember that."

True. True. True. But some occasions create their own reasons for celebration. Armagh and Tyrone were struggling not just for the right to progress yesterday but for legacy and greatness. Tyrone progressed. Both sides won. Later it rained and Peter Canavan took a stroll on the canal waters.