We needed that! Isn’t it amazing how often football delivers the perfect reminder of why we love the game so much, and at the perfect moment?

And Hawthorn’s dramatic one-point win over Geelong to cap off the AFL Easter round was all that and more. And arrived, not for the first time when it comes to these two perennial powers of the 21st century, with impeccable timing.

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It’s been an underwhelming start to the 2026 season, let’s be honest, much of it self-inflicted by an AFL getting too cute with its fixturing and leaving a fan base feeling like a new football year had coughed and spluttered back into our lives rather than arriving with a long-awaited bang.

But perhaps Easter Monday was that moment, albeit a month late, both logistically and symbolically.

Finally, we have an AFL ladder which means something, each team at last having played the same number of games. And finally, we got a big-ticket blockbuster which ticked all the boxes as to what constitutes a memorable football contest.

Mitch Lewis and Jack Gunston celebrate at the final siren. Photo by Michael Willson/AFL Photos via Getty Images

Big occasion. Big clubs. Big moments. Big drama. Big finish. And yes, big clangers, too, for they also go towards what makes a memorable game of AFL football lodge permanently in the memory banks.

Which got me thinking about why for 55-odd years now I’ve maintained such a strong emotional attachment to the game of Australian football. In a nutshell, it’s because of epic contests like this one.

It also made me think about how so often these days when it comes to appreciating our great game, we fail to see the forest for all those trees.

So much of the “content” and the discussion created around the game now seems to focus on the individual pieces of the jigsaw puzzle rather than the picture as a whole. You know, “talking points”, “controversy”, so much of it in my view at the expense of the actual results supposedly the point of it all.

Shannon Neale kicked four goals straight for Geelong. Photo by Michael Willson/AFL Photos via Getty Images

But aren’t all those little bits just a means to an end? It’s those windows like the last quarter of another Hawthorn-Geelong epic which are what it’s really all about, isn’t it?

Here’s an example. Caught up in the incredible finish at the MCG on Monday evening, I posted something suitably laudatory on social media. Not unusually these days, it attracted as many naysayers bemoaning the mistakes which were made by players of both sides, and of course, the umpiring, an absolutely guaranteed sub-plot of any social media discussion about AFL of the modern era.

It’s tediously inevitable. As is the carping about the isolated skill errors of this player or that over the course of an incredibly physically-draining two-hour slog. And one thing I found particularly noteworthy in this amazing finish, was just how “spent” virtually every player on the ground appeared at the end.

Jack Dalton (debut) and Flynn Perez (club debut) celebrate winning their first game for the Hawks. Photo by Quinn Rooney/Getty Images

It’s why I’d be a little circumspect highlighting, say, Mark Blicavs’ late out-on-the-full effort for the Cats, given he’d earlier in the quarter slotted a beauty on his left foot, or any issues Jai Newcombe might have had earlier in the final term, when it was he who won the decisive centre clearance which enabled Mitch Lewis to kick the levelling goal for the Hawks, then Newcombe’s kick inside 50 which allowed Jack Gunston to score the winning point.

It’s not even a conscious thing, probably, but the forensic nature of the way the game and all its attendant components are dissected now makes me think sometimes that we’ve become harder to please and hyper-critical. It’s a game of footy we’re watching, after all, not the solving of a mathematics problem.

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Yep, Monday’s final term was as notable for errors under severe pressure as flowing football, but had every target been hit by a pass lace-out and each moment of ball-handling pristine and error-free, would we have had as many thrills as fans that we ended up getting? I doubt it.

If it’s perfection you seek, go and watch a training session, not two teams going hammer and tongs in front of 85,000 people screaming themselves hoarse with scores level and a couple of minutes left on the clock.

This amazing contest had a bit of everything, really. That’s what helped make it great. And how about the volume of the roars coming from either the Geelong or Hawthorn support bases at the ‘G in those frantic final couple of minutes?

Those were the sounds of people totally absorbed by AFL football at its finest. And call me a dinosaur, but when it’s all said and done, as rivetted as I’m supposed to be by free agency speculation, wrangling over the northern academies, and the politics of Luke Sayers’ lewd photo, it’s finishes like Monday’s epic at the MCG which I reckon are all that really matters.

You can read more of Rohan Connolly’s work at FOOTYOLOGY.