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Defeat is often the baptism from which the greatest champions emerge.
In a team sport the narrative surrounding victory is habitually about the collective. It has to be – everyone gets a medal and everyone played their part. Different, necessary cogs that all operated in unison to give birth to a triumphant machine.
But for the loser, the story often drifts towards individuals. Just ask Leon Davis, Hayden Ballantyne and Jack Darling.
Failure is the loneliest of places, and it shines a light on each separate component, each part of the unsuccessful contraption.
Defeat is also a chance to rise, though, a chance to practice defiance and a particularly resonant brand of sporting heroism. You’re typically only described as gallant in defeat, rarely victory.
The Swans were gallant last Saturday but Josh Kennedy went beyond that. He was transcendent. He was the best player on the ground – the tinted glasses of the pundits who somehow missed the 46 occasions that Jason Johannisen kicked it right to a Swans player will never change my mind on that.
Kennedy added his name to the list of superstars who saw their star escape the darkness of a grand final loss and shine brighter than ever before. He joins the likes of Gary Ablett Sr., Nathan Buckley and Brendon Goddard in the club of champions who did everything in their power on the season’s final day to disprove the logical proposition that one man will never beat 22.
Those three don’t have a premiership medallion, but Kennedy already does. I suspect, though, that in five or ten years when we reflect on Kennedy’s career we won’t remember him as a premiership player first – we’ll remember the way he played in defeat.
His second quarter in particular will be the stuff of almost legend. It joins Chris Judd’s third quarter in the 2010 elimination final against Kennedy’s Swans as one of the all time great thirty minute stretches of hard, inside midfield dominance.
It was also one of the great halves – 22 touches and two goals to the main break – that Cameron Ling and Dermott Brereton both rightfully labelled one of the best you’ll ever see.
Kennedy was everywhere. Always more imposing than graceful, he was dominant in the clinches, his preternatural ability to find the ball combining with his perhaps unrivalled ability to hold position at stoppages and have the strength to find runners by hand on the outside.
Famously, Kennedy was banned by the Swans from lifting weights because he was already so naturally big and strong, and for a stretch in that dazzling second quarter it looked like that size and strength was certain to banish the Bulldogs’ fairytale to the hells of almost.
Kennedy strikes an unlikely figure in the middle of the ground, shoulders impossibly broad but perpetually hunched as well. His frame is Herculean but somehow awkward at the same time, hounding opponents like a groundskeeper chasing away an intruder.
He plays with desperation and relentlessness, like he’s Jarryd Blair and needs to do all the hard, dirty stuff to keep his spot in the team. But the beauty of Kennedy is that he’s got 16cm and 15kg on Blair, and that, among other reasons, is why Blair is selected close to last in his mediocre team and Kennedy was selected in this year’s All-Australian team.
In the second half the Bulldogs were able to quiet Kennedy, although he still had 12 touches and a goal after the break. If you averaged those stats every half you’d be the best player in the competition, but the Bulldogs’ ability to reduce Kennedy’s impact from ‘heavenly transcendence’ to merely ‘playing like the best player in the competition’ was still enough to be instrumental in their victory.
Not too many other Swans will be able to hold their heads high after Saturday, a little surprising given how close the game was.
Heath Grundy exorcised his demons of 2014 with a brilliant performance, putting together a defender’s greatest hits of intercept marks. Dane Rampe was similarly excellent at reading the play – or rather, reading the Norm Smith medallist’s errant boot – and helped conspire to trigger Jake Stringer’s mental implosion (bar one, telling moment).
Isaac Heeney was classy beyond his years all day long, as he always is, and Tom Mitchell capably played Robin to Kennedy’s Batman in the midfield, especially in that pivotal second quarter stretch where it looked like the Swans might run away with it.
The Bulldogs caught them, though, and now the Swans are left with more blood in the tracks.
Two grand finals in three years as favourites, two crushing defeats – one crushing for how inevitable it was from the first bounce, the other for how long inevitability was kept at bay.
The Swans might rue bad luck and the injuries to Lance Franklin and Dan Hannebery – but no team playing the Bulldogs could ever rest on the excuse of ill fortune.
Sydney are left in a strange place, virtually assured of annual excellence, but lacking something odd and intangible – an identity, perhaps.
Josh Kennedy didn’t lack for anything on Saturday. 34 disposals and three goals in a grand final is the defining sentence of his legacy.
He tried to bulldoze over a fairytale but these Bulldogs, as all of Australia knows by now, are a resilient bunch, and one man couldn’t overcome 22 and an entire nation behind them, even though for a fleeting moment it felt like he was so brilliant that he just might.