All is right with the world again. Kerry, the acknowledged master race of Gaelic football, are All-Ireland champions after a tense final which lacked beauty but compensated with excitement.
It has been an unprecedented 11 years since Kerry last mounted the winners' rostrum in Croke Park. And if the winning margin of three points scarcely reflected their superiority over Mayo they will hardly care.
Kerry survived a late siege to win by 0-13 to 1-7 in front of a crowd of 65,601. Yesterday's win was the 31st in the county's history. Having won eight national titles in 12 seasons from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, yesterday was their first appearance in a final since that era ended.
"It's better as a player," said their ebullient manager Paidi O Se, who played on eight winning teams. "But when you are 44 and two stone overweight and going slow, winning one as a manager isn't bad."
Mayo will have to take Paidi's word for it. Beaten in the final for the second year in succession their young team appears to have come to a cul-de-sac in terms of their progression.
Their veteran players Liam McHale and Dermot Flanagan had a singularly bad day, the latter departing with a hamstring injury after just four minutes.
The nature of Flanagan's injury was particularly misfortunate. Having burst onto the field 15 minutes before the game began, Mayo had spent a large portion of the time before throw-in lying on their backs in one corner of the field with their feet in the air, stretching their hamstrings.
Opinion was divided as to whether they resembled dead ducks or a bad synchronised swimming team. Their poor subsequent performance settled the argument.
"We were beaten by the better team," said the Mayo manager, John Maughan, afterwards. "It would have been an injustice if we had taken that game in the end, but we almost stole it."
The larceny almost came to pass when Mayo were awarded a penalty 13 minutes into the second half, at a time when they trailed by six points.
Their pony-tailed corner forward Kieran McDonald scored the kick and for the following 10 minutes the game looked to be in the balance as Mayo added a further two points and Kerry registered three wides.
The elegance and grace of Maurice Fitzgerald from Cahirciveen was the difference, the ultimate difference between the sides, however. There were only two scores in the final 20 minutes of the match, both of them sublime, both from Fitzgerald's boot. He scored nine of Kerry's 13 points, an emphatic consummation of a decade's promise.
"I feel relief and a great sense of fulfilment. I was pleased with the ways things went for us all. Myself and Denis O'Dwyer said all year we would go home to south Kerry together with the cup. He was the first person to greet me when the final whistle went."
Having been defeated in last year's All-Ireland semi-final, yesterday's win is a benchmark in astonishing progress for this young Kerry side. The greatest of all football dynasties is perhaps about to re-establish itself.
There is no harsher football public than that which lives in Kerry. You don't bring bad opera to Milan and you don't bring bad Kerry teams to Croke Park in September. Mayo found that out the hard way for themselves yesterday.