MUCH swooning in the Ard Comhairle. Palpitations in the expensive seats. Gasps over the hors d'oeuvres in the executive boxes. Meath and Mayo swinging away like saloon bar brawlers down on the sacred turf. Welcome to the All Ireland football final replay.

So Tommy Dowd lifted the Sam Maguire above his head and embarked on a very long speech. Mayo trooped away to count their wounds and shed their tears. Croke Park reflected on all that had transpired in the previous 70 minutes.

Fisticuffs. Sendings off. A penalty. A controversial goal or two. A tight finish. Coyle and McHale leading figures two weeks ago were written out early on yesterday. Lesser characters emerged to prominence. In short, it had all the ingredients of a great and gripping pot boiler. Except of course it was badly written. The football was poor and ragged like bad prose. We stayed with it until the end and then pronounced it poor stuff.

Perhaps it smacks of another code, but we are overwhelmed this morning with feelings of deja vu. Maybe we are all prisoners to history. We've certainly passed along this way before. These plot lines seem familiar?

In Meath, this week there will be resentment. The remarkable nature of their season and their achievement will be overshadowed in a climate of condemnation. Phones to Liveline will be hopping. Meath will take up cudgels against the world once more. Maybe they'll refuse to accept their medals from specific parties.

It will be claimed that criticism of the physicality of some of Meath's play will amount to a grudging negation of their achievement.

In Mayo, there will be fear and loathing. Fear that the future looks the same as the past. Loathing for many reasons. The key refereeing decisions yesterday went against them and they wound up losing by just a point.

No cup then, but one of the most genuine hard luck stories to bear back across the Shannon since the time of plenty?

Bonfires will be lit and declarations of intent will be made, but Mayo will decide that yesterday was a beginning. When it came to the physical exchanges Mayo stood up and had themselves counted. One point off an All Ireland.

The lines being uttered in both counties will have a certain allure. The truth is probably somewhere in between.

Mayo weren't muscled out of contention by Meath yesterday or hustled away from the steps of the Hogan Stand by Pat McEnaney. They committed sins of commission. Mayo made mistakes in both halves and as a result left the game behind them.

Meath may turn in on themselves and sulk, but several of their challenges through both games were beyond the bounds of fair play. They will counter that there hasn't been a football game this season unscarred by such challenges. They'll ask us to find somebody who will claim that this Mayo team weren't streetwise.

Meath's achievement is still remarkable, whatever way the debate swings this week. Meath beat both of last year's All Ireland finalists on the way to this win and their semi final showing stands as probably the best team performance of the year. They got away only with what they were permitted to get away with. If anything has failed, it is the rules and the referees.

Deprived of the novelty of a Mayo win and a delirious procession westwards, the hoi polio will descend on the entrails of yesterday's game and pronounce it foul.

They will probably be right. It was ugly, but that is the nature of the beast. The stakes in big time Gaelic football have gotten too big for the quaint guardians who police it. Referees need to be made semi professional.

For the second year in succession, the performance of a referee will consume as many column inches this morning as that of any player in the football final. Pat McEneaney didn't suffer the sort of landmark misfortunes which did for Paddy Russell last year, but his general permissiveness in the first game of this final series set the scene for yesterday's roostabout.

Both games were pockmarked not just by outbreaks of free for all shemozzling, but by a series of incidents of almost unsurpassed ugliness where late tackles and third man tackles threatened to decapitate certain players. It is time surely for a frame by frame video analysis of what transpired yesterday and a considered debate about how it happened and why it wasn't so unusual. No witch hunt will change the outcome of yesterday's final. A serious look at Gaelic football might change the texture of next year's.

As for the football, it was poor to middling yesterday.

Meath did what they had to do. Having trailed from the 10th minute they got their noses in front for the first time with nine minutes of normal time remaining. Mayo came back to equalise and the game hung for the taking with five minutes left. In such circumstances, the experienced punter will always pick Meath to prevail. Meath know their way around those plot lines.

In the dreamy aftermath, afterwards, Tommy Dowd sat quietly beside Sean Boylan on a little blue couch in the press room, the manager quietly patting his captain on the head. Both men reflected quietly on a long season, Boylan coming close to tears on several occasions.

"Mayo played better today than the last day," said Boylan, "and they still didn't win. My heart breaks for those lads, but our boys dug really, really deep. I'm very, very happy. It's one of the most emotional days of my life."

Dowd, scorer of the goal upon which the game swung, re-lived the moment.

"Graham (Geraghty) was fouled, the ball was kicked in I got around the goalie, was falling as I kicked it into the net, and I hit it hard enough so it would go in. We kept the good wine to last I suppose.