When losers win, there's nothing
6/10/2007
NOW I know this will sound a little strange, but I'm feeling a bit sorry for those Geelong Cats fans right now.
As a life-long North Sydney Bears supporter I've got a lot in common with them.
Sure they only had to wait 44 years for a premiership while for us Bears fans it's 85 years and still counting, but the basic tenet is the same.
It's all about hope and disappointment; of chances missed and opportunity lost and always in the pit of the stomach that familiar feeling of unfulfillment.
I remember as a kid watching the fans of other clubs coming and going from North Sydney Oval with looks of smugness on their faces.
They didn't have to say the words but they were there as clearly as if they had been written on their foreheads: We've been there. We've won a premiership and you haven't.
But you know what? After a while you got used to it. You even got to like it in a sick way.
I mean, it is an accomplishment of sorts. Any club can win a premiership (and they all did in my lifetime) but it took something special to lose year after year after year.
We'd look at those other supporters with all their cockiness and think: Yeah sure, you might win the premiership this year and you might not but we are 100 per cent certain we won't be winning, so at least we won't be disappointed.
Besides, there was always the glorious unknown to sustain us; that question we asked each other every year as we sat at home in front of the telly watching some other team do the lap of honour.
I wonder what it must feel like?
The Geelong fans have been asking themselves that question for 44 years, and now they know.
I guess it feels great right now. The afterglow of the demolition of Port Adelaide is still buzzing around their heads like they've just sucked some giant Fruit Tingle.
But I'm wondering if midway through the final quarter when it was obvious they couldn't lose, there was a twinge of grief for that unfulfilled hope they had carried inside for so many years.
Whether some of them asked themselves: Is this it? Is this all there is? Then what? What happens next week, next month, next season?
After all those years of dreaming about it, the question has been answered, the fantasy realised.
So what now? You can't experience something for the first time twice.
All this came to me in the moments after the NRL Premier League grand final last Sunday afternoon.
How good was it? A grand final being played in daylight between the Mighty Bears and the Parramatta Eels.
OK, so the Bears aren't really a club any more and so what if most of them had never left Redfern and crossed the Harbour Bridge in their lives. The logo on their chests said Norths and the red and black never looked more beautiful.
When Joey Williams kicked that field goal to put us one point in front with less than two minutes on the clock I screamed as loudly as the time Mitchell Cox scored in the corner against Manly in 1980.
We were back. The Bears in all their glory. Finally, a trophy for that big empty glass cabinet at the leagues club. And then, with 12 seconds left, the Eels scored the winner and the commentator said the words we've come to know so well, Another heart-breaking defeat for the Bears.
Heart-breaking? Maybe. Reaffirming? Definitely.
All was back as it should be. There was nothing we weren't used to, nothing that would put us into a spin – unlike what Geelong fans are going through right now.
Sure they might have the AFL premiership trophy, but we can still sit down over a beer and ask that magic question.
I wonder what it must feel like.
Mike Colman is also a columnist for The Courier-Mail.
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