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The prospect of the Adelaide Crows putting together a dream finals run fizzled out pretty quickly last night against Hawthorn, but what the club has achieved in the last two months will go down as quite possibly the story of the season.
It says a lot that you could name Scott Camporeale coach of the year and no one would vehemently argue against it.
It says a lot you could do the same with Taylor Walker and captain of the year – especially if you go back and listen to the reaction after Phil Walsh decided to give him the role pre-season.
That the club as a whole – players, coaches, staff – rallied to put themselves in the position of playing in the second week of finals was itself an enormous effort. Not that long ago, you couldn’t have predicted such an outcome.
It was two months ago today the footy world were feeling for the club and their cross-town rivals Port Adelaide as they walked on to Adelaide Oval for the most emotional Showdown ever played, just a week after the Crows made that tough road trip to face West Coast.
Internally, the Crows players had made a decision to move forward and, in the words of Patrick Dangerfield that week, “get back on the horse”.
“This side is good enough to be playing (finals) so it’s about us playing good football for longer, which is what Phil often talked about,” Dangerfield said during the difficult transition to putting the focus back on footy.
That day would indeed require them to play good football for longer, with both sides giving it everything and the match going down to the wire. The Crows went on to defeat Port Adelaide by three points, which can now be seen as the start of an impressive charge towards September footy.
There would be five more wins added under caretaker coach Camporeale – ranging from a Friday night defeat of the finals-bound Richmond, to a coach-ending belting of Essendon by 112 points, to an emphatic reversal of the West Coast result two weeks before finals.
After that, the Crows were finalists for the first time since 2012. Of course, not only did they make it, they won a game – which is set to provide a healthy platform to build from next season, as Camporeale alluded to in his press conference last night.
“It’s been bloody hard for everyone that’s been involved and as I said to the players after the West Coast game, it could’ve gone either way,” Camporeale said.
“They decided as a group they wanted to keep going forward and to put the performances they did to get to this position, they earned the right to play, they won a final, so (it’s) great experience for our group.
“They started a journey, there’s some great foundations in place for this footy club going forward.”
Before looking too far ahead – there will be plenty of time for that – The Advertiser chief football writer Michaelangelo Rucci is correct to say this wasn’t the season the club had planned.
“A year of celebration, the 25th anniversary of the Adelaide Football Club’s formation during the greatest shake-up in SA football, was to have been a grand party,” Rucci wrote.
“Instead, since July 3 – when coach Phil Walsh died – it has been a human endeavour against tragedy.”
If there’s an immediate positive from last night’s result, it’s that Adelaide players finally get a breather.
In the bigger picture, those most affected can take heart from the fact Phil’s legacy will live on.
His inspired choice of Walker as captain, based on a sense of on-field leadership rather than any ability to run meetings or address the media with clean-cut eloquence, is a perfect example.
One of the lasting images from this season, among the more sobering ones, will be ‘Tex’ running the length of the MCG wing in the fourth quarter of an elimination final. Rather than going for goal and eschewing the botched disposal that normally comes after such runs, he would execute a pin-point pass to a team mate visible only from the corner of his eye, setting up the goal that would prove the sealer.
It was a moment of beautiful football. That a club had to rally in unimaginable ways just to get there made it all the more beautiful.
They flew as one.