Graham, who doubles as Cavan’s new manager, said: “The show goes on for me but I’m not going to worry about that at this moment. I just have to sit down and gather all my thoughts and let this settle in because there’s going to be one hell of a party over in Mullinalaghta for the next week and up to Christmas. This win, for this club to do it, is a fairytale. It’s astonishing what they’re after achieving and every club that watched this game on telly today will say, ‘You know what, maybe we could do that some day’. There’s still hope for the underdog yet and the smaller clubs.”

Graham said it wasn’t difficult to convince his players they would win despite hailing from a parish of less than 450 people, 11 times less than the amount of members at the Kilmacud club.

“The great thing was we knew that coming into the final, there was absolutely no pressure on us, nobody really gave us a chance,” said Graham.

“We were big outsiders which is always a great way to be coming into a match. And we said that whatever happens we were going to give it one hell of a go, we’d have no regrets. We weren’t going to come and play within ourselves and go into a defensive shell and invite them onto us.

“We didn’t want to do that but at times in the second-half it did look like that. But, overall, the work ethic of the lads, they just tracked runners left and right and I thought their energy levels were superb. I thought we just wanted it more to be honest. Maybe that’s a bit disrespectful to Kilmacud.”

Graham raved about the performance of Patrick Fox who marked back to back All-Star Paul Mannion virtually throughout and held him scoreless from play.

“We really got up to the pace early on and got hands on them early on,” said ex-Cavan attacker Graham.

I thought Paddy Fox at full-back was outstanding. People were talking about the marquee forwards that they’d have but I’ve seen Paddy Fox for the last three years and he is one of the top full-backs you’ll see in the country and he showed that today against one of the marquee forwards in the country.

Kilmacud joint boss Robbie Brennan admitted they made the fatal error of thinking they could run down the clock.

“I think that’s probably the mistake we made - we started trying to hold it instead of doing what we’ve done all year which is go forward and attack,” said Brennan.

“And for whatever reason we reverted back to type, which we had been doing probably for the last three years, more of a defensive game, keep ball, go backwards with it.

“We reverted to that for some strange reason and it caught us out, yeah. We just played sloppily towards the end of the game. To be fair, I think Mullinalaghta deserved it. “