So the Cats lost at home and the Giants lost at home, and all of a sudden we know nothing about how this glorious season of AFL football is unfolding.

This wasn’t the most spectacular weekend of football we’ve witnessed this year, but it was mighty influential. Like Round 12, things happened that, as a collective, didn’t look in prospect a week ago.

Consider the following.

– Hawthorn beat the crap out of Port Adelaide on Thursday, clinching top spot for another week regardless of the outcome of the rest of the weekend

– Sydney beat Geelong, in Geelong, playing Geelong like Geelong, which is a huge deal, particularly given the Swans were travelling off of a six-day break

– Collingwood beat Greater Western Sydney, in western Sydney, with the Giants doing their best impression of a deflated car tyre

– Richmond played the Dogs to the wire, which perhaps says more about the Tigers, but it confirmed the Doggies scoring challenges

– Adelaide pummelled the Blues at the ‘G, and are now on a league-leading, eight-game winning streak, and could be considered a premiership favourite

– North Melbourne hung with West Coast in the west, despite missing arguably six of their most influential ten players, and losing two more in the game itself

It is a sequence of events that will, like Round 12, be looked back upon as pivotal in shaping the season.

Geelong lose a preliminary final against the Swans? It’s because they figured out how to beat them in Round 16.

Giants get swept by the Dogs and Crows? It’s because the Pies showed how to beat them in Round 16.

Roos luck their way into favourable finals match ups, then storm to a grand final as they get their best players back? It’s because they showed they can mix it despite their absentees in Round 16.

We’re bringing out the grandiose statements a lot this season, so forgive me if you’re getting a bit tired of it. But the reality is, this season is so freaking close that sentiment swings are quick and short lasting.

The Hawks have been installed as premiership favourites on most major books, while the Dogs have fallen to the sixth line. In approximate terms, the reverse was true just weeks ago.

The sum of this weekend just passed is a ladder that looks impossibly tight given 135 games of football have been played. Every team bar North has a chance of finishing Round 17 in the top four, and every team bar the Hawks has a chance of finishing Round 17 outside of the top four.

It’s glorious – a kind of utopian parity that should only exist in the private dreams of Gil McLachlan and his executive.

This is glorious #AFL pic.twitter.com/Y5t6F6znCr

— Ryan Buckland (@RyanBuckland7) July 10, 2016

The table is set for a frenetic final seven weeks of the home-and-away season. Storylines abound, and here’s a few to keep an eye on, starting with tomorrow night’s barn burner.

Thursday night will frame the premiership race
The final (scheduled) Thursday night fixture of the year has fallen nicely for HQ: one versus two, with the winner sitting atop the ladder for the weekend. Cam Rose will bring you the good oil on the game tomorrow so I won’t spoil his analysis here.

By around 10:30pm (AEST), we’ll either have a Hawthorn team sitting two games clear on top, or the Sydney Swans sitting on the throne with the largest percentage in the competition. Either of these outcomes will paint the rest of the season in the colours of the victor.

A Hawthorn victory would confirm the #AnyoneButHawthorn narrative. After copping a pasting from the Giants in Round 6, the Hawks have been ranked third on my Offensive Efficiency Rating (OER) and third on the equivalent Defensive Efficiency Rating (DER) – alongside West Coast as the only team with top four ratings in both categories.

Hawthorn can change their name to the Hawthorn Zombies – they might look dead, but until their brains are splattered all over the walls of the MCG, they ain’t dead.

For the Swans, a victory would not only yield top spot, but victories against their fellow Big Three members in consecutive weeks. The narrative power of that pair of Ws is immense – and unlike, say, the Giants, who’ve also conquered their fair share of not-literal-but-figurative giants, the Swans will do it in consecutive weeks and at the pointy end of the season.

Against the Cats, Sydney’s over-reliance on Lance Franklin was exposed as the argument worthy of ridicule that it is. Franklin was kept very quiet by Geelong’s defence (one goal, 15 touches and four inside 50s), and in his place the Swans had 11 goal kickers. If anything, the over-reliance on an individual sat on the opposite side of the field that evening.

Are the Cats just cold, or is something amiss?
Geelong suddenly find themselves in sixth place, which is a somewhat meaningless piece of information given the congestion around the top of the ladder. Still, they’re a win outside of the top four, and with the Crows, Dogs and Eagles playing Collingwood, Gold Coast and Carlton respectively, it’s likely that’s where they’ll stay for another week.

Their loss to Sydney, which we covered above, was interesting in so far as it exposed pretty much every Geelong weakness: a top-heavy midfield, a reliance on their forward press, a real lack of ground ball defence inside their defensive 50, and the raw nature of their small forwards.

They’ve lost four of their past seven now – three of those losses coming against teams outside of the eight – and the blueprint has been the same each time: throw numbers at the ball and give zero space.

I had some interesting stats in last week’s Friday Night Forecast regarding Geelong’s press. In wins, the Cats have an inside 50 differential of +17.5 per game, which is off the charts. In losses, they break even. The Cats are reliant on territory and repeat entries, and stopping their opponent from having the same.

That’s going to win you most games against every side, but against the Cats, that positive differential in wins is quite telling. To be at their most threatening, Geelong want to starve their opponents of the ball and of opportunities, to give their ageing back six a leg up in positioning – which they do better than any other side in the competition. But when it doesn’t work, it can all come crashing down quickly.

So they’re probably just cold – weary after blitzing the competition in the opening rounds of the year. But with games against Adelaide and the Western Bulldogs to come in Round 18 and 19, we’ll learn soon enough if it’s just a phase, or something more structural, before too long.

Who is going to stop the Adelaide Crows?
Speaking of the Crows, permit me to crow just briefly. Two rounds into the year, it was emerging that Adelaide were going to be just fine without their best player; 15 rounds in we can upgrade that to crystal clear.

Adelaide are on an eight-game winning streak, and are still to play Brisbane, Essendon and Fremantle in their final seven games. Those percentage boosters are punctuated by re-matches against Geelong, West Coast and Port Adelaide, while this weekend’s home stand against the Pies should be a reasonably tidy victory.

The Dangerfield Cup replay is to be played at Kardinia Park, which looked like a much tougher assignment this time last week. Outside of that – who beats this team? The Crows are bludgeoning their opposition with a hammer laced with razor blades, and it’s unclear whether there is a team in the league that can go with them when their system is working.

Adelaide score on 54 per cent of their inside 50 entries, a league-leading mark and making them one of two teams that scores more often than not (GWS being the other). They have failed to kick 100 points just three times this year, and two of those were 97-point scores. Are you scared yet? Okay one more: the Crows kick almost 20 per cent more points per minute of possession than the League average, and concede six per cent fewer points per minute of possession.

They are an instrument of football efficiency, and I’m not sure anyone can stop them.

North Melbourne: A finals wildcard?
You’ve probably read this take five times this week. North Melbourne are pretenders, their first ten weeks of the season is meaningless, and after losing five of their past six they’ll be lucky to hold their spot in the eight come around 23. They won’t need to bother with resting their players in the final round, ‘cos they’ll all be planning holidays anyway!

Okay, I added that last one.

It’s almost as if playing teams ranked first, second, third, fifth and sixth on the ladder, three of those games interstate, is difficult. It’s fingernail deep analysis that not only ignores context, it pretends context doesn’t matter.

North Melbourne may have coasted in the first part of the year, and they’ve paid back some of that early-season excess performance on the ladder with their more recent output. At the halfway mark, the Roos had won 1.7 games more than their abilities suggested they should’ve – that figure has dropped to 0.7 now. That should be expected; few teams make it to the 15-game mark without dropping one or two or three along the way.

Even in this season of upper-half parity, a 10-5 record with a percentage of 113 is nothing to sneeze at. North Melbourne might be the eighth-best team still in the game, but they are still in the game. This is what makes them a potential wildcard.

Against the Eagles, North were missing Daniel Wells, Shaun Higgins, Jarrad Waite, Ben Jacobs, Luke McDonald and Drew Petrie (wait, what?), and lost Farren Ray and Mason Wood during the game. We can throw Kane Turner in there too. Those are some very important cogs in North Melbourne’s machine, whom they can expect to get back at various points of the remainder of the season. They will enter the final rounds of the season as the biggest unknown quantity.

But more pertinently, North Melbourne have hardly been blown off the park by their more fancied rivals. Their loss to West Coast was the most narrow home win the Eagles had put together this season. Straight kicking kept the score close against the Cats. They were within nine points of the new premiership favourite Hawthorn Hawks. Add this into the mix – North have lost players to injury before halftime in each of their past five games.

North Melbourne are going to have to do it the hard way, as they have done in each of the past two years. But they will be there, once again, ready to give it a shot.

And for the rest of the finalists…
The Western Bulldogs are set to become this year’s Fremantle Dockers – an excellent defence gives way to a middling attack, and while defence can take you to September, the ability to score is what sets the best teams apart from the rest. The Dogs score around 15 points per game less than the top eight average, and almost five goals fewer than the league-leading Adelaide Crows. They won’t reach those lofty heights, but closing the gap between themselves and the finalist average must be the goal.

Their option is clear, but complicated: bring in Tom Boyd, subject to him having won back the support of the playing group. He isn’t going to fix their problems himself, but in the Western Bulldogs system, having a constant marking threat inside the 30-metre zone will help create space for their bevvy of medium forwards to go to work.

GWS’s capitulation (49 points for, 113 points against after quarter time) at the hands of Collingwood has to have been a misnomer – there is no way a team that has put in the work that the Giants have this year can turn on a dime like that. They’ll be okay, and are almost certainly a lock for the top four given their run home makes Adelaide’s cushy draw look challenging.

And West Coast? Well, they’re fifth, with a chance to scrape into the top four despite playing for most of this season on autopilot. Their high-profile recruits have, for the most part, failed to deliver, and they remain mired in their front-running ways. The health of Nic Naitanui looms as critical to their prospects.

There are seven weeks of home-and-away football to go, and the jockeying for positions is going to be unlike anything we’ve seen in recent AFL history.