Saturday, September 22, 2007

The Preliminary Final

24 hours later and I'm breathing easier, my pulse rate is lower and I'm starting to enjoy the feeling.
What feeling?
The feeling that comes when your team makes the Grand Final!
Last night was a very tense, very exciting, very stressful affair, and that was just for Carolyn!
Imagine how Sport Boy and I coped!
I'm serious actually, Carolyn couldn't handle it even in the first quarter and by the last she couldn't watch or listen to the radio!
Poor Sport Boy got very emotional and was crying at 3/4 time.
Geelong were not playing well, Collingwood were playing great and the most dreadful outcome was looking very possible.
I comforted SB and prepared him for the worst.
"We might not win"
He looked me straight in the eye and said "We're gonna win"

His faith looked justified when we got out to a 17 point lead half way through the last but when the Magpies inevitable comeback started to happen I again warned him that we may not make it to the Grand Final.

And again he looked at me calmly and said as if it was written in indelible letters, "We're gonna win"!!

I believed him, as much as I could, but the Collingwood army was in full voice as 98.002 fans roared and rocked the MCG to it's foundations and the Hot Pies kept coming.
It took all the heroics the Cats could muster to hold them off and cling to a 5 point lead as the final siren went and the pressure was finally released!
I just stood nward, glad and grateful and mightily relieved.

We had won a classic and now we're in the Big One.

The Geelong theme song never sounded so good as when sung by the delerious proportion of the MCG's new record crowd when the siren went.

I cried.
Sport Boy cried.
Carolyn just breathed a mighty sigh of relief.

The train trip home was fun even though we were sitting with a family of Collingwood fans.
They were disappointed not devastated, clearly we had a lot more to lose than they did.
In fact, my image of feral Collingwood fans was largely dispelled last night. Besides the fans on the train, we sat behind another family of Pie's supporters up in the nose-bleed section of the Great Southern Stand and we got along really well with them, all shaking hands after the game.

We are Geelong
The greatest team of all.....Preliminary Final

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Go Cats....

Zaac said...

carn the cats!
sounds typical of geelong, be brilliant all season and then give us a heart attack at the last moment!
have a task for you, i'm trying to find a way to watch the game via t'internet as i don't think i'll get to see it otherwise, could you see if they're broadcasting it internationally at all? am kind of expecting to have to pay to stream it off a site somewhere.
glad the holiday is going well, shame about you losing stuff, ne'er mind. australia is doing well in the rugby, not as well as new zealand i fear but we'll see what happens. is there much on about it over there in the height of the footy season?