ALL-IRELAND SENIOR HURLING FINAL: ANOTHER SEPTEMBER and the scenes in Croke Park are at once familiar and electrifyingly new. How many ways can a team find to express its greatness and collective spirit? With this Kilkenny bunch, the capacity for reinvention seems endless and the desire to win deathless.

Through one game of hurling, Kilkenny seemed to have dodged Time herself. Twelve months after Tipperary broke free with a deluge of goals, the genie is back in its bottle and corked. The scores dried up for Tipp’s vaunted forward line and they did well to keep it at its end total of 2-17 to 1-16.

This was vintage Kilkenny, with scores embroidered with fabulous stick work underlining a performance of controlled and demonic hard work. Yesterday’s win marked Kilkenny’s 33rd All-Ireland victory. It brought an eighth All-Ireland medal for Henry Shefflin, completing a triumphant return after last year’s departure from an All-Ireland loss and a winter spent in lonely rehabilitation from a cruciate injury. Noel Hickey, Eddie Brennan and Michael Kavanagh also claimed their eighth medals

via Kilkenny return with a vengeance – The Irish Times – Mon, Sep 05, 2011.