Derry manager Ciaran Meenagh acknowledged that their two point semi-final loss to Kerry was a missed opportunity but stressed the need for 'perspective' given how far the county had travelled in four years.
In contrast to their limp exit against Galway at the same stage last year, the Ulster champions delivered a blistering performance for much of Sunday's semi against Kerry, leading by two points until a late surge from the champions settled the game.
"The dressing room is in a state of shock, including myself," Meenagh told reporters afterwards.
"It is a hugely disappointing changing room, I spoke to the lads for a couple of minutes but there is not an awful lot that can be said.
"The overriding feeling is that they did themselves proud and Derry proud for so long. But ultimately we did not do enough to get across the line."
While the punters had cooled on Derry following their laboured and unimpressive victory over Cork, with many observing predicting an eyesore of a game, Meenagh was determined to attack Kerry from the beginning.
"We came here to win this game," the Derry boss said afterwards. "There has been a lot of punditry and a lot of commentary about our style of play. And a lot of that is fair.
"But that also created a lot of opportunity for us because Kerry might have looked (at it) like that as well.
"We decided we would really go for it.
"Look, our style of play was the same in terms of how we defended. [But] we looked to play with urgency and intensity and when those openings came for the players, we were intent on going for it.
"We were very confident coming into the game, we felt we were going to win it, we thought we had the tools.
"We felt we had the players to take out a lot of their key threats and to contain some of the others that are almost impossible to contain on the best of days.
"We also thought we had an attacking plan and we worked ferociously hard on that attacking plan in our training based on the model that we knew Kerry would defend on.
"We were also conscious that Kerry might look at us and they might play without a sweeper and the players on the field began to coach each other and we really started to go after that tactic. We cut them apart in the first half and we scored very, very heavily."
Leading by three points at the break after a first half in which their shooting had been stellar, Derry were rocked on the back foot in the third quarter, with Kerry outscoring them 0-04 to 0-01 to leave it 1-12 apiece on 50 minutes.
However, they regained the initiative in the subsequent 15, re-taking the lead while Kerry were mired into a scoring drought which dragged until late.
For Meenagh, though, Derry's sudden profligacy and failure to push home their advantage in this period was one of the things which cost them.
"There was a 10 minute period there in the middle (of the second half) when it looked like every time we attacked we would cut them open.
"You could feel it, our players grew back into the game and we looked like creating opportunities with our hard-running game from deep.
"Our inside players were starting to get separation but some of the chances we created (sighs).. put it this way, we took much more difficult chances I felt in the first half than the chances we left behind us in the second.
"It's gutting, like."
As to the conundrum of dealing with David Clifford, who scored 0-09 altogether and picked up another Man of the Match award, Meenagh was illuminating, admitting that the most they sought to achieve was 'managing his impact'.
"We felt we matched up brilliantly on everybody else and we felt we had the best man marker in the game in Chrissy McKaigue but for us it wasn't about taking David Clifford out of the game.
"It was about managing his impact. He’s an incredible player. He may be the greatest player who has ever played the game or if he’s not, he’s definitely inthat conversation.
"I thought, pound-for pound, Chrissy gave some account of himself today. I though it was an incredible battle. It wasn’t like we dropped three or four players to double or triple mark him. We couldn’t do both things today - try and win the game and try to stop them hammering us.
"We played with ambition and courage. We couldn’t have led by three at half-time or by two after 63 minutes unless we put our trust in Chrissy and Conor McCluskey to mark Paudie Clifford. We had Sean O’Shea identified for Pádraig McGrogan and had to make a move very early in the game.
"To get back to the question, how do you take David Clifford out of the game? I don’t know. I don’t know how you do that.
"All you can do is try to manage it and weigh everything up in context after that."
Amid the wreckage of the defeat, Meenagh, who took the managerial reins in chaotic and difficult circumstances ahead of the Ulster final, issued a call for perspective on how far they'd come.
The Tyrone coach had started as part of the Derry backroom team under Damien McErlean in 2019. Their first match was a one-point win away to Antrim in Division 4.
"The word I used to the players in the changing room is a word I have used a lot in the last 10 weeks. The word is perspective.
"We beat Offaly 24 months ago in the Division 3 final. So you have to take into account where we came from, where Kerry were at that time, where Dublin were.
"Look at the trajectory we are on. As devastated as I am, as gutted as I am, look at where we came from.
"I started with Derry in 2019. We were in Division 4. We were going to Fraher Field. We were down in Wicklow.
"With all due respect to those counties, they did make life difficult for us.
"But look at where the team that has come in a short period of time. There are a lot of players in that changing room who played Division 4 football, so for every county in Ireland, I think Derry is a great example of a team that commits to each other, gets their house in order and does things right over a period of time.
"We give great hope to everyone else as well."
