I don't think Kilkenny can have any qualms about the result. Tipperary just had a bit more in the tank.
Obviously there's a lot of talk about Richie Hogan's sending off and while I'm not sure it defined the game, it certainly affected it as a spectacle.
I was seated 10 rows back and right in front of the incident when it happened. And I'm not sure how it ended up being a sending off.
My argument wouldn't necessarily be whether Richie caught Cathal Barrett with his elbow or not.
Rather, I'd argue that when Cathal side-stepped to go back and avoid Richie's charge, then Richie's momentum going through in the wet conditions caused the contact.
Maybe the contact was too fast for us to see but I put what happened down to momentum rather than a fellah going to do someone else with an elbow to the head.
But look, while the sending off will make the headlines I still think that, even with 15 on 15, Kilkenny would have needed everything to go right to win.
Yes, everything went right for Kilkenny in the first 20 minutes, bar maybe a couple of wides from Walter Walsh and Cillian Buckley.
John McGrath's hook on Colin Fennelly in the first half - I'm not sure that it got that much notice, maybe it was too early in the match, but it prevented a goal for Kilkenny that could have put them on the right track.
But they had too much to do once Tipp got going in the second. People might question the Kilkenny tactic of going long to a Tipp full-back line that dominated under the high ball.
But at the end of the day, this Kilkenny team had been built under the high ball. And the fact that Cathal Barrett was going to be a loose man meant it was going to be very hard to bypass the extra man.
In fact they almost had a second man back the whole way, or most of the way - so they had a fella underneath the ball and then one to receive it. It meant that Kilkenny actually had a loose player themselves in their backline for most of the second half.
I said after the semi-finals that Tipp had played against Wexford as if they had done a lot of training with a man down.
Given how they performed yesterday, they appeared to have done a lot of training before this final with an extra man!
There was no panic, tactically they got it right and Kilkenny were left looking for that long ball to TJ Reid at the edge of the square. They were asking him to perform that main ball winning function that he wasn't able to do.
The margin of defeat is disappointing for Kilkenny and it would have been a lot closer without the sending off.
But you put the ball in the hands of an excellent team and they'll do serious damage, the Tipp bench did very well when they came on.
For Tipp, this is the third All-Ireland triumph of the decade and the achievement franks the careers of the likes of Seamus Callanan and Padraic Maher, these guys who have been around the big days and done it on the big days.
They can with justification argue that they are among the county's all-time greats.
And Kilkenny? They were absolutely delighted to be in this All-Ireland final, thrilled to have beaten Cork and Limerick - two huge victories.
Genuinely I believe it would have been a close encounter if it remained 15 on 15 but that's the nature of the game - and there's nothing you can do when these things happen.
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