Duffield: Freo fans – sorry for your loss

Freo fans – sorry for your loss. I share your pain.

An epic Grand Final – the equal of anything I have seen in my time covering footy. A magnificent performance by both teams for all but four minutes – then one of the teams lifted and franked its footy greatness – and it wasn’t Freo.

It was brutal. At the MCG the purple people in the crowd all round me went from raucous to silent. The Brisbane Lions section a couple of bays further round lifted like their team in a wave. Where we sat it felt like a tsunami had crashed on us.

It’s a free country we live in so you can deal with this however you like, but as a person who wants desperately to see Freo get one of these things this morning I am going to tell you how I am going to handle it.

I am going to give credit where credit is due – to a Brisbane Lions team brilliantly coached by veteran mentor Chris Fagan. They have played in four Grand Finals in a row and they have won three of them.

This century, only Brisbane between the 2001 win over Essendon and the 2004 loss to Port Adelaide and Hawthorn between the 2012 loss to Sydney and the 2015 win over West Coast have achieved what Fagan’s team has achieved.

Congratulations to Shai Bolton on his Norm Smith Medal but Will Ashcroft may consider himself unlucky to not have emulated Dustin Martin – three Normies from three Grand Finals which produced three premierships. His last quarter – and those last four minutes - were astonishing.

Logan Morris took advantage of the absence of Alex Pearce. He went from three first-half touches to three last-quarter goals. I suspect that if the Freo captain had still been out there at the end – fit and charging – Freo would have flown home with the cup yesterday

From a Freo perspective this was a mighty Grand Final against a mighty opponent. One they had the better of for longer until that last four minutes.

How to deal with it? Ignore the rubbish about Wharfie Time being a factor - because rubbish is all that is regardless of the post match rhetoric from the Lions. Do you think they were just putting around at 75% and were suddenly woken up by Hells Bells? 'Oh Wharfie Time boys, let’s get going'.

What happened is that they were three goals down with four minutes left. For them it was then or never – with or without Wharfie Time.

I am going to look optimistically to how the Freo list management team is going to handle this. They have done a great job building a Grand Final list and they have done it without father-sons and top end Academy picks. Dare I say it, unlike their opponents on Saturday.

They have decisions to make – scans will reveal the extent of Alex Pearce’s achilles tendon injury – depending on what they reveal. There is optimism he won’t need surgery – the Dockers need to decide whether Hugh Davies can step into a role and whether Brennan Cox can stay sound or whether someone has to be brought in.

They need to decide how much footy Luke Ryan has left and if the judgment is not much then they need to decide whether Josh Draper can step up.

Can Cooper Simpson become another ball user out of defence? And do they have the small forward who can fill the gap that Sam Switkowski is going to leave?

What did we learn? We learned that Fremantle’s best is good enough to match it with the best team of this decade and one of the best teams this century.

And we learned that premierships are bloody hard to win – and nothing short of heart-breaking when you come up just short.