GAELIC GAMES:IT'S OKAY. You can come out now. Unbatten the hatches, take a peek out from behind the sofa cushions. This might not have been the worst All-Ireland semi-final anyone can remember but it was the hardest day's work this side of breaking rocks in the hot sun.

In front of the 81,624 who made up the fullest house of the summer, Dublin came through a waterboarding from Donegal to reach their first All-Ireland final since 1995 by 0-8 to 0-6. You know something beyond the beyonds has gone down when the first Dublin v Kerry All-Ireland final in 26 years is an afterthought.

A little splash of stats will give a flavour here. This was Dublin’s lowest total in a championship match since losing the 1996 Leinster final to Meath by 0-18 to 0-8. They didn’t – couldn’t – score from play until the 60th minute of the game when the game-changing Kevin McManamon galloped on to a Bernard Brogan flick and drew the sides level at 0-6 apiece. Only the younger Brogan and Colm McFadden took more shots at goal in the game than Dublin goalkeeper Stephen Cluxton.

Donegal will be strapping on the Kevlar this morning because most of the blame is headed in their direction. For an hour here, they took this game and choked every last breath of air out of it.

They gave Dublin all the possession they wanted from Cluxton’s kick-outs and laid ne’er a finger on them until they reached halfway, whereupon they laid nothing short of great vengeance and furious anger.

Pat Gilroy swore afterwards that Dublin got exactly the game they expected but that wasn’t how it appeared for the first half. Dublin looked like men who were being asked to explain Newton’s First Law while driving dodgems.

Donegal went in 0-4 to 0-2 ahead at the break and if Gilroy was confident his team would crack the code, he was in the minority. “That was one of the easiest team talks I’ve ever had to give because we were exactly where we thought we would be,” he said afterwards.

“We expected that game. The hard team talks are when you’re dealing with something that you don’t expect but we knew from the start the kind of test they were going to pose. And all we wanted to do was keep our composure and tweak a few little things. But at no stage in that game did I think we weren’t going to find a way. I was very confident it would happen for us.”

The Hill wasn’t confident at that point, no siree. By midway through the first half, they were booing Donegal every time they laced together a string of handpasses around their half-back line. And Dublin weren’t blameless either. Despite the fact that Donegal played with only McFadden in the full-forward line, Gilroy’s side didn’t exactly commit an army forward when they had the ball.

Jimmy McGuinness will have his face on a wanted poster for the next while but Gilroy won’t be one of those wielding a torch or pitchfork.

“I totally admire them,” he said. “Totally admire them. Why would you go out and leave a load of space against fellas who kicked 22 points the last day? It was just sensible what they did. You would have to admire them because it’s incredible to get a whole group of players into the sort of shape you need to be in to do what they did for so long today.” In the end, Donegal had neither the energy nor the experience to hold out.

Even when Diarmuid Connolly was sent off just short of the hour mark, the wind kept blowing in Dublin’s direction. McManamon gave them impetus and once Dublin went a point up, Donegal had no way of changing tack. They played to compete in the game when they needed to play to win. Afterwards, McGuinness was unrepentant.

“Everybody’s got an opinion,” he shrugged when asked how it felt to be in charge of team that was getting booed purely for its tactics. “It’s irrelevant to us. For 19 years, Donegal teams would have come here and played a certain brand of football that hasn’t served us well. It hasn’t brought rewards to fellas who’ve put in an awful lot of work over those 19 years.

“We feel now that our lads have a National League medal and an Ulster Championship medal and at 0-6 to 0-3 up (just after half-time), we were at a point where we could have pushed on and made it to an All-Ireland final. We need to go away now and see can we come back stronger and can we sort out the offensive side of things.

“The pundits have their opinion, the man in the street has his opinion. My job is to put medals in these players’ pockets. We’ve managed to do that twice this year and nearly made an All-Ireland final.

“We’ll obviously try to improve ourselves over the winter but we won’t be going to Ballybofey and Castlefin for training next year with the intention of making Pat Spillane feel good. That won’t be our primary objective.”

Nor should it be. When put like that, it was hard not to feel there was something almost grimly heroic about Donegal’s cussedness here. And yet, and yet. Rarely have we felt more in need of a good final to cleanse the palate.