IN 2007, football embraced the idea that audacity breeds life where order breeds habit.

The game got quicker and so Geelong, Port Adelaide and the Kangaroos rose as Sydney, Fremantle and Adelaide fell. If this was at times difficult to appreciate on Saturday, as the greatest grand final massacre of all unfolded, the disentangling of the broader season's intricacies told us this was so.

Play and players moved at increased speeds, raising the value of game-breaking risk while taking the game an evolutionary step beyond the spider's web of Sydney's stoppage success.

Teams, such as the Western Bulldogs, who were at the forefront of a daring push in 2006, lost their competitive advantage in 2007 as better equipped outfits such as Geelong and Port borrowed from them and went by.

This was a concern not only for those left behind. A 60-page AFL document, produced by the laws of the game review panel and released mid-season, concluded: "It would be predicted that the speed of the game would decrease as players become more tired, but this has not happened. In fact, it has increased significantly."

The Cats were never anything less than a sound defensive side under coach Mark Thompson. They always understood the importance of the contest. It was just that this year they stopped trying to hold on to the ball as you would a vial of nitroglycerine, and with it the tempo of the game, to run at the opposition and allow the panic this freneticism could cause to become an ally.

Where Sydney and Adelaide kept to their strategies of incremental advance and territory won like yards on the Somme, punishing teams into physical submission along the way, Geelong met that challenge but not to reproduce it for the opposition but to go on the attack.

It is true the Cats were fitter — none more so than Gary Ablett and Steve Johnson — and therefore better able to charge where once they dug in, but it also required an interest in doing so.

An interest, it seems fair to speculate, piqued by the need to find an edge on the Sydney-West Coast hegemony and the necessity of servicing a solid but far from imposing attack that too often in the past relied upon Ablett G and Paul Chapman conjuring something from the crumb of a half chance.

It was not by happenstance that seven Geelong players took better than goal-a-game averages into Saturday's denouement. Neither Port nor the Kangaroos allowed themselves to be shackled, either, and the results were inarguable. In the end, they were not quite good enough but they were certainly vastly improved. Possession, as the raison d'etre it often appeared to be in 2006, was not enough for any of them. The 10th, 12th and 14th placed sides of last year were first, second and third 12 months on.

Moreover, Port and the Kangaroos swept past so many without making the defensive adjustments that are held sacred by devotees of the "negate before create" stream of football thinking. Port moved 10 places on the ladder but conceded only 113 points fewer than it did in 2006. The Kangaroos conceded 169 less points.

By September, even Mick Malthouse had put aside his copy of The Art of War and was encouraging his players to go after Sydney instead of sandbagging themselves from defeat.

It could be said, of course, that the difference was at the other end of the ground but this would be to focus on the result instead of the method. And to ignore the other critical influences on the season; injury management and the unprecedented importance of the interchange gate.

The sophistication of the preparation of the modern AFL player coupled with the revolving door use of the interchange allowed bigger bodies to run faster, for longer, than ever before. And those teams, like Geelong and Port, who were of a mind to break from the stoppage arm-wrestle were able to do so like never before, provided they were able to keep their runners running.

Geelong had but one player, Matthew Egan, missing from its grand final side.

Only Michael Wilson missed for Port. Would either side, as good and as adventurous as they were, have got to the last Saturday in September with a run of misfortune as bleak as Melbourne's?