And, for a little over a half, that's exactly what appeared to have happened. The Eagles began the grand final like a side intent on rewriting what had become a very familiar script and, with a little more efficiency, might have had their third AFL premiership close to sealed considerably earlier.

Well, that's how it looked. But we should have known better by now. Of course, Sydney came back. Of course, the finale was suitably dramatic. And of course, like 12 months ago, we'll be talking about this premiership play-off for the rest of our lives.

This one might not have finished with a Leo Barry-type mark for the ages, nor a first flag for 70-odd years. But as a game, it was a cracker. More open than the 2005 version, perhaps with a few more blunders, but moments of brilliance and heroism no less marked. And a one-point margin for the first time since perhaps the most famous grand final of them all, in 1966.

West Coast ended up needing all the breathing space it created for itself with its early superiority. But the Eagles had earned it fairly and squarely, from the moment Ashley Hansen took his third mark and booted the game's opening goal six minutes in.

If anyone personified the determination to turn the tables of fate, it was the young key forward, who'd had an ordinary grand final last year opposed to Lewis Roberts-Thomson, but beat his man comprehensively when it mattered yesterday. He was quick on the lead, sure of hand and foot. Just like, as you'd expect, champion teammates Chris Judd and Ben Cousins, who posted the second and third goals of the match before Sydney had managed a reply.

But significantly, both came after the sort of slips you wouldn't expect of their opponent, Judd's goal off the ground the result of a fumble by the Swans' Amon Buchanan, Cousins' clever snap following another fumbly moment from ruckman Darren Jolly.

Barry Hall missed from 20 metres, Michael O'Loughlin failed to make the distance with one attempt before finally putting his team on the board, Jude Bolton missed two more very gettable goals. Then Hansen nailed his second right on quarter-time.

It was a 16-point gap that continued to grow, thanks to West Coast's centre-square superiority. Dean Cox turned in the sort of game he does so often, not only dominating the hit-outs, but winning the sorts of possession numbers more typical of those at his feet, and the clearances to boot.

Jarrad McVeigh made a fair fist of keeping Cousins under wraps, but Judd was having the better of his battle of the superstars with Adam Goodes. And then there was Embley, running himself into the ground with nine possessions and a goal in the second term alone, 15 by the long break, as the Eagles continued to belt the ball forward, two quick goals to Quinten Lynch and another to Cousins after an unfortunate slip by Tadhg Kennelly blowing the gap between the sides to within a whisker of 30 points.

Sydney might have thought then that the good fight had been lost. But this is the Swans we're talking about. And you sensed change was on the cards from the moment Adam Schneider chased and dragged down Michael Braun in the first minute of the second half, the resultant turnover ending with a goal to O'Loughlin. Embley replied soon enough, but Nick Davis bobbed up with another. Lynch gave the Eagles room to move with a superb set shot from the boundary, but then the unlikely form of Roberts-Thomson, thrown forward, wobbled one through on the run. He wasn't the only unlikely Swan to stir his team, Ted Richards bobbing up everywhere.

More significantly still, Brett Kirk rose another gear and Goodes began to impose himself. Kirk hit the post. Hall missed what he should have kicked in his sleep. And, when Davis booted his second of the quarter, the margin had narrowed to under two goals.

Thus began yet another incredible finale.

From the first centre break, Hall handballed to Goodes, who banged it through with just 14 seconds of last-quarter action elapsed. Five points now.

Hansen missed for the Eagles, and Kennelly rushed a behind, before, with just 7½ minutes left, Schneider's snap crept just inside the goal post. One point the difference, the Swans with the momentum, but both sides now looking all but spent.

A withering run from Daniel Kerr and clever snap from Steven Armstrong gave West Coast a seven-point buffer, cut back to the barest of margins again immediately when the hard-working Ryan O'Keefe slipped a tackle, and a long, speculative left boot bounced over desperate Eagle clutches.

What happened next was perhaps the Leo Barry moment of the 2006 grand final. Deep in attack, Eagle Daniel Chick brilliantly smothered the attempted clearing kick of O'Keefe, recovered to take possession, and handball to Adam Hunter, who ran into to boot West Coast's final goal of the game, and make it seven points once more.

Still Sydney would not die, Nick Malceski's snap curling back to bring the Swans within one point again with about 2½ minutes to play. And the final moments of the season said it all: desperate bodies from either side throwing themselves headlong at ball and man, the consequence of every possession, every lunge, every step never greater.

Like last year, it was a denouement of almost unbearable tension. Like last year, the game ended with the ball deep in the scoring territory of the trailing team, one that had fought back from deep trouble to almost pinch victory. Only the roles had been reversed.

Five clashes for an aggregate margin of 12 points. Two flags decided by a total of five points. And now, one premiership each. These two great teams could go on like this forever. And after a grand final like yesterday's, who could complain about that prospect?

It is an Ashes series with every match decided by a handful of runs or a couple of wickets. It is a pair of horses separated by a head in consecutive Melbourne and Caulfield Cups, with a Cox Plate photo finish thrown in as well. It is Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal going to a tie-breaker in the deciding set of five consecutive grand slam tournaments. It is Tiger Woods and Ernie Els with barely a shot between them over four days of a major, then deciding an 18-hole play-off on the last green. It is Haile Gebrselassie and Paul Tergat being separated by a tenth of a second after 25 laps at the Sydney Olympics; then doing it again in four subsequent races.

What has given rise to such remarkable set of results? Is it simply a case of two quite different teams with an almost identical capacity for output, staying power and resilience in the face of adversity? Perhaps they are Newton's third law of motion applied to football: each action from one bringing something equal and opposite from the other.

Yet there have been lots of well-matched teams through the years and no pairing has ever produced a series of games such as this. We're talking 10 hours of football, with at most a four-point margin at each two-hourly interval. After 10 hours, the difference is two points. This would seem to be more than just action and reaction: more like the football equivalent of the solar system hanging together. That mightn't be a bad analogy. Maybe the key lies in the polarised nature of the combatants; the attraction of opposites.

No pair of significant football rivals can have had such contrasting strengths and weaknesses. The Eagles' midfield is brilliantly offensive and seeks to set the game in fluid motion; the Swans' plays grim defence, stopping play more than most, limiting opponents' time to gain control. The Eagles' scoring policy is based on the theory that if enough ball is provided, the goals will come; the Swans have made an art of conversion efficiency.

So each team has a particular area of superiority to fall back on when a game shows signs of turning against it. Thus, the pattern of all five of these amazing contests has been that one team would gain the ascendancy before the other would wrest it back.

The grand finals of the past two years mightn't have been classically attractive, but they have been engrossing and close. The last time one-kick margins occurred in consecutive climaxes to the season was almost 60 years ago (1947 and the '48 draw). After almost two decades of lopsided finales being pretty much the norm, this is not just a pleasure but a blessed relief.

Improved defensive techniques have been good for something. All the tackling, the flooding and the stoppage football that have drawn criticism hasn't been without an upside. The new defensive football at least provides a greater likelihood of close finishes in big games. It's hard to criticise that.

It's hard, too, to argue with the season's outcome. The Eagles won more matches than any other team over two seasons and lost two finals by a total of five points. As for the latter statistic, so did the Swans. It's easy to see why Paul Roos would say that neither team deserved to lose two grand finals; easy to see, not so easy to say. The capacity of Roos to face both victory and defeat with equanimity would have pleased Rudyard Kipling.

His rival, John Worsfold, also excelled. He must now know better than most of the fine line between triumph and disaster. Many times in this finals series, he walked close to the edge, never more so than when his team faced a 22-point half-time deficit in its preliminary final. Failure to reach the grand final would have left him vulnerable. Instead, he's a hero.

Now we await next season's pipe opener. For the statistically minded, there hasn't been a draw in the opening round of a season for 24 years. Before that, one had occurred on average every nine years. We're definitely due.

I remember seeing Chris Judd looking unable to run and scanning the field, finding Ben Cousins looking much the same, and thinking "West Coast's gone".

But, no, they had something else. Some belief common to the West Coast team (called, I suspect, John Worsfold) remained and although Sydney beat against it like a storm, it did not break or give way.

By the end, I was desperate for a West Coast win. I could see a football tragedy in the making.

Lose a grand final by less than a goal one year, a qualifying final by less than a goal the following year and then, three weeks later, have the same opponent come from five goals behind and beat you in another grand final and you have the sort of drama that enveloped Collingwood like a bad fog in the 1960s, '70s and '80s.

It would seem, as it did with Collingwood, that the force against West Coast was forever greater than the players on the other side because there was something like a curse at work. This West Coast team did not deserve that sort of fate and, ultimately, the Eagles had it within themselves to make their own destiny.

I thought Dean Cox was the best player of the first half and Adam Goodes the best of the second. I was vaguely aware of Andrew Embley as being a constant in the match and I knew Brett Kirk was winning more of the ball as the game went on — a telling sign for Sydney.

Then came the excruciating final 20 seconds, the last 10 and, with them, that sense that time is a wall and if you lean against it hard enough you can shift it, but of course you can't. You have to endure.

Then the intriguing matter of Cousins being given his own place on the victory dais and then the team photo with Judd up the back and Cousins in the centre.

Judd is the internal sort. Cousins is the party boy; he knows how to whip up a mood, generate energy. He is also a native West Australian. He is clearly still central to the leadership of this team.

One of the most interesting comments I heard after the grand final was from a TV reporter from Perth saying the Eagles' premiership celebrations in 1992 and '94 were pretty wild, but they did not compare with this week's.

We won't know for a couple of years whether this West Coast team deserves to be rated alongside its champion predecessor, but one thing is for sure, last Saturday was West Coast's best grand final win, the most meritorious, the most revealing, the most exhilarating.

To learn after the match that the brilliant three – Judd, Cousins and Daniel Kerr – were also the wounded three, only takes the match a few notches higher in football folklore.

I don't believe the fact that no Melbourne club was in the grand final is as important as the fact it was a great grand final. Please, in case we have this discussion again next year, let us pause and recall just how bad those one-sided grand finals in the 1980s and '90s were, each of which contained at least one Melbourne club.

How, year after year, the season ended lamely like a play that leads to a big final line that is somehow missing from the script.

It was bloody awful going home after those grand finals – awful for the game, awful for the mass of football followers not connected to the winning team. Nor do I see the lack of a preliminary final in Melbourne as being a problem of the magnitude that was suggested. Football is now, not wholly but in part, a television game. Most people follow it through TV.

Yes, it would be good to see the Dogs win a premiership for their supporters so they can experience a thrill they have not known since 1954.

The same with Geelong and the Saints, but the absence of those victories has not stopped those people keeping faith with footy, nor was it considered a major problem in the years when Essendon, Carlton and Hawthorn routinely held sway.

In the wake of the soccer World Cup, it was critical that we have a good second half to our season. West Coast, with the help of Sydney, took us somewhere grand and for that we should be truly grateful.

Finally, commiserations to the Storm. It was during the years when the VFL-AFL routinely had disappointing grand finals that I got into the habit of watching the NRL equivalent.

There is something about rugby league that is made for grand finals. Our game has to be finely balanced in lots of places to make for an equal contest; perhaps because their game seems to have fewer variables they regularly have mighty struggles on grand final day.

The Storm won in 1999, but it hardly touched the local culture. Its loss last weekend will go a lot further with people such as me, the ones who watch from a distance.

The Storm was brilliant early, the Broncos held it out, then bad luck came Melbourne's way. But it showed plenty in defeat. Last week, I felt for the first time I knew the Storm and that in some way its struggle was mine.

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Consecutive Matches
2006, Round 26