As sick Leinster as feel after losing a third successive Investec Champions Cup final, the motivation to get there will never dim, according to captain James Ryan.
If not 'try again, fail again, fail better', the lock, speaking after their 31-22 loss to Toulouse at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, was defiant when asked if the fallout from the La Rochelle defeats in 2022 and 2023 had weighed heavily on the team’s mind, in particular, on a nervy start to proceedings.
"It’s just tough. I don’t know how to answer that.
"What we said in the changing room was, when you want to do great things and you want to achieve great things, you always want the risk of failing greatly as well, do you know what I mean?
"Would I rather be in a team that tries to be the best team in Europe every year and have risks in a team like this? I still would.
"That’s part of trying to do special things, but as I said, you run the risk of feeling like this, but that’s the way we are.
"We want to win trophies and there’s a lot more hurt now, but as Leo (Cullen) said, we just have to bounce back. That’s the way it is.
"Bounce back in another competition to go after, and hopefully do as well as we can in that."
The sides were tied at 15-15 after a try-less 80 minutes and scored one apiece in extra-time. However, Thomas Ramos took advantage of poor Leinster discipline to add three penalties to their tally.
Cullen (above) is no stranger to the mandatory post-match ritual of trying to put feelings from another devastating defeat into words.
"That’s the nature of sport at the top and obviously we’ve been on the losing side, unfortunately, on a few occasions now," he said.
"You get this narrative that builds off the back of that, people start adding all the different bits together but when you break down this specific game it came down to very tight calls at different stages.
"Not enough of them went our way unfortunately, over the course of particularly the first 80 minutes anyway.
"Whatever about the last 20, you lose James to the bin and they score their try.
"So, yeah, listen, the lads have been immense in terms of the character they’ve shown and they need to show a bit of character now because if you think about it you kind of get the sense of what’s coming, I guess.
"You know, you lose another final and we’ve got to deal with that ourselves.
"But it’s not like there’s a lack of belief that we can actually go and do this.
"There is a belief that we can do this. We just have to stick it at it because I think when they get across the line, which I have every confidence that they will as a group, these two guys (Ryan and Caelan Doris) will be spearheading that challenge for many years to come."
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