As Munster's players lingered on the sidelines of Virgin Media Park after Friday's 30-21 win against Benetton, to a man they looked a couple of stone lighter.
They’ll be relieved to see their season last for at least one more game, and excited by the prospect of maybe even extending the campaign further than that.
Given how the season was looking a few weeks ago, play-off rugby was the cherry on top of Champions Cup qualification, rather than the other way around.
For the team, it would have been a heavy burden to become the first Munster side in three decades of the competition to miss out on Champions Cup rugby and the players were well aware of that.
"It was mentioned. A couple of weeks ago it was mentioned and then it became a reality over the last two weeks," captain Tadhg Beirne said of the pressure to secure their place at the top table of European competition next season.
"Particularly in this club we proudly say we love Europe and we love being in Europe and it’s a bit about Munster’s identity being in Europe so not to get there that would have been really difficult."
At half-time at Musgrave Park on Friday night, the sense of unease was palpable. Trailing 14-10 to Benetton, results elsewhere meant that only a win would be enough to get them into the top half of the table, and for the second week in a row they found some extra gears in the third quarter, seeing out the win without any major drama.
"We stuck in it," said the Ireland and Lions forward.
"We knew how important today was not just for the league, but for Europe, for the leaving players and I think we’ll look at the second-half performance, not the first half, in being proud of what we achieved today.
"You know it’s going to be a bit of a boxing match. The lead switched over and back, but it’s just important to stay in the fight and keep at it and trust in the process.
"It’s two big weeks in a row for us on the back of three poor weeks. We needed a little bit of confidence. They say winning is a habit and I think on the back of two wins it will give us a good boost into these last, hopefully, three games. But we know we’ve got to do it the hard way."
It would be an understatement to suggest this would be doing it "the hard way".
Munster will take on the Sharks in Durban on Saturday 31 May in the quarter-final, and would likely be in Pretoria the following week for a semi-final with the Bulls. If they can scale those two mountains, a final against Leinster would be the likely prize.
As unlikely as their 2023 triumph was on the road in Glasgow, Dublin and Cape Town, this would be a level above.
Beirne said: "We all know how hard that can be [in South Africa], but this group has gone over there before and won so we’ll quietly back ourselves and we’ll get our work done behind the scenes.
"We know the quality that is there. We’ve done it before and we’ve confidence in ourselves to do it again.
"I suppose that was in the back of everyone’s heads that if we didn’t qualify we didn’t get Europe. But we’re here now and we know we’ve qualified for Europe so we’re chasing a trophy now and no matter how difficult it is we’ll give it 100% and make sure we give it a proper crack."
Interim head coach Ian Costello (below) had a consistent message, although his relief at securing their place in the play-offs was clear when he was asked about his preferred quarter-final opponent late on Friday night.
"Don't misquote me on this, I don't care [who we play]. We needed to be in there," he said.
"You've got mental and physical energy, but I think the one that takes the biggest toll is the emotional energy when you have to go to the well.
"It's easier to go to the well when you've got depth in your squad, and there's really genuine competition in places, and training is competitive. So we'll take a couple of days to decompress, probably reset, and then all the focus, which is nice, 10 to 12 days to look forward to a quarter-final, whereas we've been rolling week on week for the last while."
And the Munster coach is hoping that the high-pressure nature of their last two wins against Benetton and Ulster can give them a head-start on preparing for knockout rugby.
He said: "There's some milestones there that we can go back to. We've played two weeks of knockout rugby now. We go into the third week, we'd love if it was five weeks, but that's what the last two weeks have felt like. We lose one and we're out.
"So hopefully that sets us up. It's always going to be very, very difficult to go to South Africa, but we've done that before as well. We've drawn on that belief and we draw on a lot of things over the last couple of weeks as well."
Watch the Champions Cup final, Northampton Saints v Bordeaux Begles, on Saturday from 2pm on RTÉ2 and RTÉ Player. Follow a live blog on rte.ie/sport and the RTÉ News app
