IN DUE course, the Cats will complete an inquest into what caused a hitherto dominant team to falter on the defining day.

They'll consider why players chose the wrong options, why Cam Mooney botched those shots and ask whether Steve Johnson should have been as far up the ground, gaining cheap possessions instead of kicking goals. They might second-guess selection calls, such as picking Mathew Stokes despite a sore groin.

Unfortunately for Geelong, the 2008 grand final is likely to be remembered (except by those of brown and gold persuasion) as the premiership the Cats blew, more than one the Hawks won. One intriguing theory, which the Cats have already contemplated, is whether they had too much success en route to their doomed finale. Or, put another way, that they had insufficient adversity.

Defeat, as we know, is a better teacher than victory — Geelong's dismal 2006 is testament to that. But Geelong didn't lose, or get tested, often enough to discover its own foibles.

It wasn't broke, so it didn't fix it. The Cats had, relatively speaking, an easy draw.

They didn't play the Hawks, the Western Bulldogs or Collingwood twice and it's possible that they entered the title fight without having known what it was to be pounded, to take a standing count and recover, to get knocked down and get up, or just stay down.

It's reasonable to ask whether they would have been better prepared had they lost another game or two — at the least been pushed to the wire a few times — exposing the weaknesses that were papered over by those cricket scores. Would a loss to the Hawks, or Dogs, have given Mark Thompson and his players cause to prepare contingencies and alternatives that weren't produced on grand final day?

Many within the competition had nursed a suspicion that Geelong's forward structure was suspect. In retrospect, this relative weakness had been evident in the 2007 and 2008 preliminary finals, when the Cats owned the midfield, were steady in defence, but couldn't bury Collingwood and the Bulldogs.

Imagine that Tom Lonergan, their second forward target, had failed in a couple of big-game defeats. Would this have prompted them to promote Tom Hawkins, whose progress stalled this year?

Had the flawed forward structure, Travis Varcoe's vulnerability and the over-reliance on Mooney been shown up earlier, the Cats might have developed and experimented with fallback strategies.

In the grand final, it wasn't clear that the Cats were in serious strife until Stuart Dew's five-minute cameo; until then, they could say, with some justification, they were winning the stoppages, getting the ball forward and just had to nail a few shots.

If we'll never know whether the Cats were undone, in part, by the absence of adversity in 2008, it's an idea they've pondered.

"I think you could say that," said football operations manager Neil Balme, asked whether they'd had a lack of regular-season challenges. "There's no doubt, with hindsight, maybe we didn't have to — if we had've had some more tighter games or lost a few more games, we may have had to rethink some of our form. But the reality is we didn't have to.

"So it's very hard, you know, to use that and say: 'Gee, wish we had have lost more games.' But it certainly can have an impact, and … our process of reviewing games was pretty stringent and didn't rely on result, it was all about the process, as they say. So I don't know if it would have made all that much difference."

Balme said the coaches would review the grand final, as if it were any other game.

They can review it as per normal, but sadly for the Cats, it wasn't just another game.