A strange feeling swept across Croke Park on Sunday afternoon as Joe Canning's 73rd minute point ensured a first All-Ireland SHC draw since 1959. The overriding feeling among the Galway squad afterwards was relief at getting a second bite at the cherry.
Galway captain Fergal Moore was glad the Tribesmen kept their ambitions for a first All-Ireland title since 1988 alive, and feels his side is stronger now because of Sunday's exploits.
"Everybody deserves full credit," he said. "The only score that matters is the final score and we fought very hard for every ball from start to finish and that's very pleasing."
Moore still knows that improvements can be sought from his squad.
"There are a few things we need to work on, but we've a couple of weeks now to learn from the lessons of today.
"We'll work hard in training for the next couple of weeks and see where that takes us.
"We started well and got the goal early on, but we're playing the All-Ireland champions on the biggest day of the year and they came back, showed their experience and ground their way back into the game.
"We were a couple of points up at half-time, but we knew they were going to come back at us and that's what they did in the second half."
Moore felt Kilkenny's experience over the past decade stood to them in Sunday's final.
"They're not champions for the past few years for no reason. They kept tagging over the scores and didn't panic. We kept tipping away, but probably needed a little bit more composure on the ball at times.
"We're a young team, though, and we're learning every day that we go out. We're extremely happy to get another bite at the cherry."
Elsewhere in the Tribesmen defence, goalkeeper James Skehill was already trying to put the drawn game behind him and focus on the replay.
"We've three weeks now but we've won nothing. Then again, we lost nothing either. It leaves us with a lot of work to do," he said.
He was glad to keep a clean- sheet in such a major game and felt that along with Galway's ability to score goals at the opposite end were two of their major strengths in this game.
"We went 15 or 10 minutes without a score, but we managed to score goals and not leak any, so that's a positive," the Cappataggle clubman said.
"There are positives and negatives to take out of every game and none more so than this one and we just have to try to knuckle down and analyse where we went wrong and fix that and raise our performance another 20 per cent because I'm sure Kilkenny will do that themselves.
"We're not beaten and we've three weeks of training to look forward to and hopefully three weeks of improvement.
"We know the decibel level, we know the size of the crowd, we know the noise of Hill 16. We're familiar with all of them and at least we have that now.
"Even playing in my first All-Ireland, that's a bonus, but we still realise we have a lot to do and hopefully we can get over the line the next day."
In the Kilkenny camp Henry Shefflin was happy with his decision to put a late penalty strike over the bar.
"My first option, obviously, was the one I decided to go with," said Shefflin. "To be honest I did think about it [going for goal][, but at that stage of the match it was critical that if they had stopped it we were really going to be under pressure. It was going to be a big score so I put the trust in the backs that we could hold out and unfortunately they got a free or two and that brought them back level."
