It could be worse for Kilkenny - They might have won

Apity the Semple Stadium authorities didn’t allow the Waterford hordes to swarm onto the field afterwards, as their Wexford counterparts had been able to do four weeks earlier. A pity for two reasons.

Firstly and most obviously, it was nothing less than they deserved or the occasion demanded. Fifty-eight years of hurt and all that. Secondly, a pitch invasion would have provided the neatest tailpiece possible to Kilkenny’s season, a brief campaign that finished the way it started.

For so many years they ruined the joy of others, time after time, coldly and unapologetically, a posse of professional hitmen who took unostentatious pride in their work and knew no other form of existence. Now here they were, for the second time in a month, victims of another county’s delirium, the butt of someone else’s punchline.