"We're going to regret it for a long time," was the blunt verdict of Padraic Joyce after his side's gut-wrenching missed opportunity in Sunday's All-Ireland final.
The Galway manager understandably wasn't in the mood to stick about for a lengthy, navel-gazing post-mortem, and the GAA press officer told the assembled media to get their questions done sharpish.
After the 2022 All-Ireland final loss, Joyce came into the press conference spitting poison about the late free call against John Daly which swung the momentum back towards Kerry with four minutes left in the game.
This time around, the blame lay closer to home.
"We're absolutely devastated. The dressing room is in an awful state. Firstly, congratulations to Armagh and congratulations to Kieran McGeeney on the job he's done with them.
"You can't take that away from them. They won the game.
"We have to be realistic here. We didn't play anywhere near to our potential in the second half. We probably made more mistakes in the second half than we've made in all the games all year.
"Look, it's going to be hard to take. We had 25 shots on goal and we scored 13.
"I'm not going to sit here and criticise players because they're great lads in Galway. The effort that they've put in for me all year, and the last five years, has been fantastic.
"It's just hard to put your finger on how we didn't perform the way we should have performed."
For Galway, who entered the game as marginal favourites and with a chance of becoming only the third county to enter double digits in the football roll of honour, it was a second All-Ireland final defeat in three years.
In 2022, it was new enough terrain for them, with most of the accumulated pressure heaped on Kerry beforehand. In that context, Galway were perceived to have over-performed in the decider, even if they faded down the closing stretch.
Sunday's defeat, however, has an entirely different feel.
"A couple of years ago, in the last couple of minutes of the game, Kerry were a better team than us. Today… we had chance after chance after chance and it's going to be hard to take.
"We’ll stick together in Galway football, we’ve come a long way from where we were, we are devastated today but football in Galway has improved. At least we’re back up at the top table as such.
"It’ll be a tough couple of days trying to get home tomorrow and we can hopefully hide in the middle of race week next week and do something out of the way but it’s going to be a tough few days."
"We have to be realistic here. We didn't play anywhere near to our potential in the second half. We probably made more mistakes in the second half than we've made in all the games all year."
Injuries have been a constant companion for Galway in 2024 and that theme continued to the bitter end, with Rob Finnerty - ironically thought to be the least doubtful of the feted inside forward line - hauled ashore after 10 minutes, the Connacht losing their free-taker on the right hand side.
Added to that, the explosive Damien Comer struggled again to make an impact, failing to score for the third game running in Croke Park, the supposition being that his own injury woes were still dogging him. Shane Walsh, meanwhile, who hobbled through the closing stages in the famous win over Dublin, suffered an off-day, in a sorry contrast to his heroics in 2022.
The extent to which injuries impeded Galway in the final was open to doubt but Joyce, in any case, wasn't inclined to play them up as a factor.
"Injuries are injuries. We dealt with them as best we could and we ended up in the last two for the year, so we obviously dealt with them okay. Had they an impact on lads being fully, fully fit as the year went on? Possibly. That's probably one thing you could say. But we're not looking for excuses here.
"I don't think the injuries caught up. The injuries didn't kick the ball wide or take the shots. It wasn't injuries catching up with us. No one goes out to play bad, just not enough of our players hit form. Rob was a big loss to us as well early on.
"That probably impacted most of the decisions we made as well as regards substitutions all day. Look, it's very hard to stomach it."
With the full-forward line shackled and depleted, that left Galway reliant on scorers from the middle third, with the veteran Paul Conroy landing three boomers from distance, while the unheralded Céin D'Arcy also notched 0-03.
"You have no choice but to hit long-range shots when you're playing against 15 men behind the ball all day," replied Joyce. "There's not much we can do there.
"It's going to haunt us for a while. We had a great chance after a super year. Both teams did. We knew coming into it that someone was going to be disappointed and someone was going to be elated.
"We're going to regret it for a long time."
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