The Galway minors looked dead and buried heading into injury time of normal time last week. They looked dead and buried halfway through extra-time last week. And they looked in a fair bit of bother with ten minutes remaining in today's replay.
At the end of it all, they're still alive.
An almost spooky ability to grab goals just when they needed them unnerved their opponents. By the final whistle in today's curtain raiser to the curtain raiser, they had nudged ahead of Kilkenny on a scoreline of 3-10 to 0-17. Over both weeks they amassed 5-30 and conceded 0-43, somehow trailing their opponents in the white flag tally by 0-13 and still emerging on top.
However, there is bitter debate about the goal that won it for them with less than two minutes remaining.
The consensus in the ground and online appears to be that Cian Salmon was already poised in the square well before the ball arrived.
He hoisted himself above the scrambling Kilkenny rearguard and batted the ball home. It's either Tipp or Dublin now in the final.
