This morning more than one or two people are wondering aloud if yesterday was perhaps the greatest All-Ireland hurling final they've seen in a decade or two, or maybe even longer. GAA President Liam O’Neill called it “the game of the millennium”.

These kinds of claims are almost impossible to pin down, and the debate is more in fun than any honest quest for a definitive answer. But when Davy Fitzgerald spoke to Off the Ball after yesterday’s game he perhaps summed it more aptly, stripped of any pointless attempt to quantify what we had just seen. “It’s hard to describe that”, Fitzgerald said.

The game swung back and forth; on Shane O’Donnell’s hat-trick, on Cork’s resurgence either side of half-time, on Anthony Nash’s one man show, on eight goals. When the final whistle pierced the evening air at Croke Park Davy Fitzgerald fell to the ground on the edge of the pitch as Croke Park shook around him.

“We didn’t make it easy for ourselves, as normal. But, my god, what character we showed in the end and it might have been a great game to watch, it just wasn’t great to be on the sideline watching us try to win it,” he said.

The age profile of this Clare team is probably the single most worrying factor of this whole victory for the rest of the hurling world. Eight of the starting fifteen that triumphed in the under twenty one All-Ireland final were on the panel for yesterday’s senior final. The team has an average age of just twenty three. Podge Collins is twenty one years old, David McInerney is twenty and Shane O’Donnell, yesterday’s hat-trick hero and man of the match, just nineteen.

That factor did come to mind as Cork began to chip away at the Clare lead. Experience and nerve are in many ways intangible, and often given more than their fair weight in assessing a team. But, they still count. And you wondered if, even with the success at underage behind them, the young Clare team could hold out as their 8 point lead was eradicated by a suddenly dominating Cork side. It was showing that the nineteen year old O'Donnell was the man to get Care back to scoring ways in the 555th minute, as he surged through the middle to score a point aginst the run of play and put Clare back in front and keep Cork at arm's length.

Fitzgerald acknowledged the resilience his team showed, saying: “These lads never know when to say die you know and no matter what happens in life they can never take away that Clare are 2013 all Ireland champions... we were 9 up they brought us back and came level. We went up again they came back again. It’s crazy stuff to be involved in, I’ll tell you.”