Hurt and willing to show it, Offaly had time to accept defeat long before they returned to the graveyard-silence of the losing dressing-room. Almost the entire 70 minutes had been void of hope and deprived of all oxygen, and anytime they tried to catch their breath, Kilkenny just left them for dead.
The hardest part is still to come. First reactions come easy, and, for Michael Duignan, the talk of bad times has rolled as freely as the talk of good times. "Well I know what Kilkenny went through in the past two years," he says, "and they must have been under unbelievable pressure coming up here.
"But they looked all year like they were totally focused and I don't think there was any team going to beat them this time out. They just had incredible hunger. It's very little to do with hurling at this level, it comes down to heart and hunger. They had more of that than we did."
Well before Offaly had their first score, Kilkenny were resting on a comfortable lead: "Well we knew they were going to come at us quickly," he adds. "But I still think we hurled well enough in the first half and yet went in 10 points down, which is kind of a strange parallel.
"Just a few minutes before half-time there might have been five points in it, and then they pulled away. Each time we threatened to come back at them they seemed to get a goal.
"That's what killed us, but that's what Kilkenny have a name for. We were wary of that, but we still couldn't do anything about it."
Stephen Byrne certainly couldn't. Much of the afternoon was spent looking into the assassin's eyes of DJ Carey and company. Twice he got a block to their ruthless firing and yet it was all in vain. Five times he picked the ball out of the net.
"Well, they were bang on, weren't they?" he says with a sporting grin. "Every one of them were taken very well. Their forwards were incredibly hungry and all we could do was just keep plugging away until the end."
Two came in from rebounds, a case of prevention, but no cure. "There's nothing you can do about that. That just makes it more frustrating you know, making a block from DJ Carey and then seeing the ball go in on the rebound. But they took their goals really well and that's all part of it.
"Still, it's been a tremendous year, full of ups and downs, but we picked ourselves up very well after the Leinster final and we beat the All-Ireland champions. We were here in the final and did our best and that's all part of it."
Echoing those sentiments is Pat Fleury, a tired looking and drained manager. "You're never happy to lose, no matter what the margin, but on the day I have no problem admitting that Kilkenny were the better team. They wanted it that bit more and certainly deserved their victory.
"Their full-forward line has been well written about this year and rightly so. They've more or less won all their games for them this year and did the same here.
"I suppose we did have our chances and could have converted a few more, but, from the very start, they were always winning the game and we can have no arguments with that."
There was, says Duignan, nothing they could do to halt Kilkenny's steely determination. "Of course, you don't like being beaten by that much, but for the last 10 minutes the writing was on the wall, especially with the second-half goal.
"We had played so hard up to that and, suddenly, it was double scores again. That would take the heart out of any team.
"We managed to get back somewhat in the second half, but just when we thought we had set ourselves up for a comeback they went down and scored another couple of goals."
