It's almost ridiculous that the man who has seen it all before is the most elated at the nature of the victory, but when the door is opened into the Laois dressingroom, Mick O'Dwyer is standing in the middle of the celebrations with a childish smile painted across his soft face.

You'd swear to God he'd never won anything in his life.

"Sure we were down at the start of the game," he says, "we were down at half-time, and they got ahead again by four or five points in the second half . . . That just shows you the heart that's in our side. And we got our goal at the finish. Maybe we didn't deserve it, but we got it and we won, and in football that's all that matters.

"But in fairness Offaly played some unbelievable football all the way through. And I suppose on the day they played slightly better than we did. But our fellas kept fighting, and kept challenging.

"We struggled from the word go. But they got that goal near the start and a goal lifts a team like nothing else. We had to fight back all the way after that. We kept on fighting, we never gave up, and that's a good trait in any team."

When he eventually sits down and reflects on yesterday's performance, O'Dwyer will know there are areas open for improvement.

"We were terrible early on," he admits. "I can't really understand it, but then we haven't had a good competitive game of football in eights weeks or so. They had a game against Louth, and no matter how bad that was, they still had some championship football behind them."

He'll know too that without Ross Munnelly's late goal Laois would be staring down the road of the qualifiers.

Munnelly, however, is typically gracious in his assessment of the winner.

"Well Stephen Kelly just dropped one into the square and whatever way it broke it just broke for me. All I had to do was finish it. It was very crowded in the square, and sometimes that can be to the forward's advantage, because no one knows which man to pick up.

"But rather than dwell on the goal, there was some negatives there, because we did miss an awful lot of chances.

"Under slightly different circumstances this would be a very quiet dressingroom. But it's the first round of the championship and we just about got away with the win. And we'll settle for that."

All this unbridled joy is a direct opposite to the scenes in the Offaly dressingroom, where some lie hopelessly on benches and others with their heads in their hands.

Manager Kevin Kilmurray steps outside and tries to put words to the picture.

"Let me see, how do you put it into words? I don't know," he says. "But it was gift-wrapped for Mick O'Dwyer, and I'd no intentions of giving him an early Christmas present.

"It was always going to be close, regardless of what people think about Offaly football. It's very hard to analyse a game like this straight away, so I'd love to hear a few experts tell me now what we did wrong. And where we go from here.

"We played all the good football in the first half, but it was nip and tuck throughout the second half. And the goal, well, that was something we were trying to avoid."

It's now three years of successive heartbreak for Offaly in the Leinster championship. Before returning to his team Kilmurray is asked how difficult it will be to lift them after this latest one.

"Very . . ."

Enough said.