GEORGIE PARKER: Don’t let grand final loss to Brisbane Lions define you, Fremantle Dockers

Dear Fremantle,

I’m not sure there are many words that will make you feel better.

You were 17 points up with minutes to go. You were four minutes away from having a premiership medal around your neck, and then the unthinkable happened.

And right now, I know you probably don’t want to hear that winning isn’t everything. Because on grand final day, it is.

There will be moments you replay. Decisions you question. Things you wish you could do again. That’s the cruelty of elite sport: sometimes the difference between the greatest day of your sporting life and one of the hardest is only a couple of minutes.

But I hope, eventually, you can see this season for more than how it ended.

Sport has a funny way of convincing us that the only thing that matters is the medal. We talk about premiership players differently. We put an asterisk next to brilliant careers because someone never won one. Nathan Buckley played 280 games, won a Brownlow Medal, a Norm Smith Medal and almost every individual honour available to him, yet the missing premiership inevitably gets mentioned. Eddie Betts played 350 games, kicked 640 goals and became one of the most beloved players of his generation. No premiership.

We can all agree, neither career needs defending.

Yet, that is what sport does. It turns team success into an individual measurement and sometimes allows one result to determine how we remember years of work.

I understand a small part of that feeling, not because my career belongs anywhere near the same conversation as players like Buckley or Betts, but because elite sport teaches you very quickly that you don’t always get the ending you imagined.

I still have my Olympic suit. I still have the bags, the accreditation, the photos and all the little things you collect when you get to live out a childhood dream. I get to call myself an Olympian, something I will be proud of for the rest of my life. But I don’t have an Olympic medal and I only had one shot to get one.

For a long time, that mattered to me more than all the things I did have. It was difficult not to look at my career through the prism of the thing I didn’t achieve rather than everything that came before it.

Eventually, though, you realise that if you judge your entire sporting life by the medal around your neck at the end, you risk missing most of what made it worthwhile.

That doesn’t mean Fremantle should wake up tomorrow feeling grateful simply because they made a grand final. That would be patronising. Losing like this should hurt. You don’t spend your entire life competing at the highest level to be satisfied with coming second.

But there is a difference between allowing something to hurt and allowing it to define you and perhaps the best example is the team that just beat you.

Brisbane know what it is like to walk away from a grand final feeling as though an opportunity has disappeared. They lost the 2023 decider to Collingwood by four points. They could have allowed that to become the story of that group. Instead, they came back.

That doesn’t guarantee Fremantle anything, especially not a three-peat. Sport doesn’t work like that. There is no promise that because you got close once, you will automatically get another chance. That is probably what makes Saturday hurt even more.

But what Fremantle have discovered this year is that they are capable of getting there. For the players, that matters. For the club, that matters. And for supporters who have waited their entire lives to see Fremantle win an AFL premiership, it matters too.

Right now, though, none of that will feel particularly comforting. Right now, you will probably just see those final four minutes.

But eventually, I hope you see everything else.

The season you built. The belief you created. The supporters you took along for the ride. The fact that for four minutes on Saturday afternoon, you were close enough to almost touch the thing you have been chasing.

You didn’t get the medal. That will always be part of the story but it doesn’t have to be the whole story. Because while winning adds something extraordinary to a career, losing doesn’t take the rest of it away.

And whether this grand final becomes the day Fremantle fell short, or the chapter everyone eventually points back to as the moment something began, it won’t be decided by the medal that wasn’t placed around your neck.

It will be decided by what you do from here.