On Saturday night the most popular frame of reference for Croke Park's first floodlit evening and the presence of over 80,000 spectators at a league match was that of the All-Ireland. It even looked like a harvest moon had been borrowed from September.

Tyrone's Seán Cavanagh, minutes after giving another master class at centrefield, was one of the impressed.

"To be honest it was probably better than an All-Ireland final. I suppose the whole build-up and everything that goes with it is probably better than the Super Bowl that's going to be on Sunday night.

"It's an unbelievable occasion to be part of, and hopefully we'll be able to get a few more before the league's over."

His manager, Mickey Harte, was asked about the pathology of yet another second-half turnaround. He pointed out that the improvement was based on tweaking rather than radical re-invention.

"We felt at half-time if we stepped up our performance in terms of energy that we were in with a fighting chance, and that's how it turned out. We started winning a few more balls, getting a few more scores. That was the difference. We had 12 scoring chances in the first half to Dublin's 10, but they had seven points and we had two.

"We were working hard in the first half, but not getting the return for the work we were doing," he added. "Maybe we had a little bit more composure in the second half."

Harte shared the sense of history, but was equally quick to isolate the context. "It was a special occasion and we were very privileged to be part of it - all of us who were here. It was something that people will talk about for years to come. The crowd was there, the atmosphere was there.

"It was everything you'd want on a big All-Ireland day almost - but it's only February. We would have been pleased to be part of it regardless of the result, but the result makes it that bit more special.

"It's only one result. It's not the end of the world. It's a good result, it's two league points. That's all we can take from this, as well as some players coming in and doing well."

His Dublin counterpart, Paul Caffrey, was understandably glum about the latest loss of a decent mid-match advantage.

"Half-time scores don't mean anything in modern-day football and we always knew it was going to come down to a one- or two-point game either way, and we'd be very disappointed that we'd the last two chances to get a draw out of it and we didn't materialise on either option.

"The low score wasn't just down to the tightness of it, and I think there were a lot of scores that would go over in the summer on a drier sod."

He took some solace from the enduring quality of Dublin's opponents, but can't have been happy with the latest episode of coming up fractionally short against an elite team.

"Anyone who thinks that Tyrone aren't one of the top two in the country doesn't know their football. Themselves and Kerry are up there and have shared the last four All-Irelands. Everyone knows the quality of footballers Tyrone have and they came out on the right side of a tight result."

Even the brilliant illumination of the new lights was having difficulty brightening Caffrey's view of the occasion.

"Down here in the dungeons you don't get too much sense of it. To us it was the first of seven league matches and we badly wanted to get the performance out that would give us a result. We just didn't quite get there."