PETER Booth, formerly of the ABC, used to say that he would never back Geelong when it was playing at home on the Monday of a holiday weekend. His argument was that for three days, the Cats had had everyone in town tell them how good they were and so were riding for a fall. Too often, he was proved right.

His principle reflects the uniquely intimate relationship Geelong shares with its namesake city. No other club in Victoria has a town to itself — and for that matter a newspaper and radio station, too. Nor do the clubs in Perth and Adelaide. Sydney and Brisbane are one-team towns, but each is a much bigger town than Geelong and cares proportionately less. Geelong and its football team are one and the same.

Booth's rule also explains the peculiar wariness of Geelong among punters. The Cats are premiership favourites, but their odds of $2.45 are surprisingly generous, longer by far than, for instance, Kevin Rudd at $1.60. West Coast, the second favourite, is $3.75 and firming, Sydney $6.00.

Geelong, remember, sits four games clear on top of the ladder and is already the minor premier. It has won 14 games in a row, the second-longest winning streak in the club's history and one of the 12 longest by any club. The previous three clubs to compile similar sequences — Carlton 1995, Essendon 2000 and the Brisbane Lions 2002 — all won premierships, emphatically.

Two of the Cats' three defeats were at the hands of Hawthorn and the Kangaroos. Both losses looked shabby at the time, but subsequent results have made that form good; the Kangaroos and Hawks now lie second and third on the ladder. Geelong's only other loss was to the Western Bulldogs in round one and that was thoroughly avenged three weeks ago.

Really, Geelong should be unbackable. It is kicking mountainous scores, meantime giving nothing away in defence. Gary Ablett is Brownlow Medal favourite, James Kelly, Jimmy Bartels and Cameron Ling in career-best form, even Brad Ottens has become damaging. Steve Johnson, exiled for the first five weeks, has not played in a losing team this season. He has been the icing on the cake.

Injuries have been mercifully light, reports scant, scandal a stranger. Coach Mark Thompson, who so narrowly survived a between-seasons review, seemingly is wanted not only by Geelong now, but other clubs, too. Reminiscing features on Bob Davis and the team of 1963 are beginning to appear. A mood is upon the club.

But it is one thing to conquer the present, another to stay out of the way of the past. Every football club, no matter how often it is cleaned out, is tied to its heritage. Coach and administration will say, rightly, that they can only control the present and the future. But at Geelong, they will have an eye and an ear out for ghosts.

Geelong has not won the flag since 1963. Among clubs of the former VFL, only Footscray is more starved. In the interim, the Cats have lost five grand finals, also losing six preliminary finals. They have had lean spells, but never on the Richmond/Carlton scale; they have not in those 44 years won the wooden spoon and only twice finished second-last. But nor have they won the flag.

Because Geelong is so big in Geelong, everything about the club tends to be exaggerated. Geelong is buoyed by the town — its town — but sometimes suffocated by it. There is rarely a happy medium.

It means that in the good times, it is liable to get ahead of itself, but it means also that a hitch all too quickly becomes a crisis. A Melbourne club is insulated by the white noise of eight other clubs around it, dampening the dramas. But the Cats somehow are always on the last of their nine lives.

Remember the post-season review last year? It could not have been more public if it was the Nuremberg trials. It drained Thompson, who said so — and was taken to task again for his disrespect. It was ever thus in Geelong.

As the winning streak builds, so do expectations and hysteria. Already, the bunting is coming out. Officials are outwardly calm, inwardly anxious. They have seen before how quickly one loose stitch has become an unravelling. A characteristic of the team in the Thompson era is that it does nothing by halves.

Properly considered, a defeat now for the Cats would be a hitch, not a crisis. But Geelong knows that its biggest threat at the moment is Geelong. So do punters.