Meath manager Colm O'Rourke says his team remain "a work in progress" with the scope to get better and better in the next few years.
The Royal County set up a Tailteann Cup final against Down with a 2-16 to 2-14 win over Antrim at Croke Park on Sunday.
A storming third-quarter performance ultimately proved enough for Meath to progress, though Antrim did not go down without a fight.
Meath will return to Croker on 15 July hoping to lift some silverware and offer more evidence that they are moving in the right direction.
"With the introduction of so many young players - I think 13 have played championship for the first time for me this year - you probaly wouldn't get an opportunity to do that in the Sam Maguire," said O'Rourke.
"It would be ultra competitive. We've been able to do that while still winning games, so the team is a work in progress and I think we'll get substantially better in the future, next year and the year after."
Jordan Morris led the scoring again for O'Rourke's team with 1-04 while Aaron Lynch hit the net for the second weekend running and finished with 1-02.
A scoring blitz of 1-07 without response during the third quarter put them in command, but Antrim rallied, Patrick McBride's 63rd-minute goal setting up a tense finale.
Ultimately, Meath prevailed, with O'Rourke admitting: "It got fairly hairy at the end and it could have gone either way. Antrim had a few chances.
"What always happens is, if you let a team off the hook, they come back. Fair play to Antrim. They're probably looking at this saying, 'we could have got soemthing out of it, we could have got a draw out of it'.
"It was definitely helter skelter at the end and nobody seemed to know what was going to happen. Anyone who thought the Tailteann Cup wasn't worth winning should have been here today and seen the effort both teams put into it.
"We started to pick up some of their kickouts, we were poor on those in the first half. We started to get a bit more possession, started to get people running at their defence.
"We did get a good few goal chances, maybe some more we should have converted.
"I suppose the turning point really was when Jordan Morris got the goal in the second half. It gave us a bit of a cushion and it looked at that stage like we'd be able to see out the game, but Antrim had other ideas.
"They got a lot of good scores and caused us all sorts of problems."
