The Western Bulldogs and the Adelaide Crows both would have been pinching themselves to be there, given where the Bulldogs had come from and what the Crows had endured, and a sense of that wonder informed their brilliant elimination final at the MCG on Saturday night.

In the end, two fairytales into one doesn't go, and so the Bulldogs bow out, but it would not surprise if they started training for next season on Tuesday, such is the excitement they have generated this season. The Crows will be back at the MGG on Friday night to play Hawthorn in a semi-final. What lies beyond, who would dare to day?

From the start, it was if these sides understood each other, and a mutual certainty, that neither was likely to win the premiership, so they might as well have fun in the finals as long as they lasted, and keep these 60,000 coming back for more. Playing like this this, they surely will.

Within four minutes of the first bounce, and just about before Adelaide got their hands on the ball, the Bulldogs had kicked three goals. But the Crows replied with a run of five of their own, and before the first quarter was done, Eddie Betts had three himself, of his eventual five. Thus the match had its shape and motif. Press? That's an old fashioned word for media. Tempo? Nowhere to be seen, unless someone in the crowd was called Templeton. Tagger? Peter Hanlon's column in Saturday's Sport Age, no?

The Bulldogs mapped and opened up previously almost uncharted terrain called the corridor. At the MCG, there is plenty of it. It's dangerous and thrilling, the sort of place angels fear to tread. But the Dogs were no-one's fools. And the Crows were happy to engage them there.

Sitting in his Perth lounge room, pulling the wings off flies, Fremantle coach Ross Lyon must have been appalled to see footy played in such libertine spirit. At the MCG, they thrilled to it. Being a final, and for these teams a frontier, the crowd would have roared anyway, but these sounds were fully fledged gasps, the hyperventilation of a nation. A sizeable number were with the Crows; the Adelaide economy can't be all that bad.

You can only imagine what a frightening night this must have been for defenders. Adelaide's would have watched the ball coming at them like an express train, now Crameri, now Dalhaus, now Hunter, now Jong, now Crameri again, and when they thought they had dibs on them all, here was Tory Dickson marking on the lead. He kicked five goals of his own.

For the Bulldogs' backmen, the proposition was different: here comes the ball, and there's Patrick Dangerfield - was a footballer ever more aptly named?- and there's Scott Thompson, and there's Rory Sloane, and there goes Taylor Walker, but where the hell is Betts? And there he was, in a pocket deeper than any at Etihad, where the Dogs mostly play, angling home another goal, or a pass that led to a goal. And if it wasn't him, it was Charlie Cameron, in a nightlong case of easily mistaken identity.

But the game did slow, as it had to, and the backmen did assert themselves, and their little victories mattered, and then the goals when they came mattered even more, which is sort of Lyon's philosophy. The Dogs still played their footy, ingenuous but loveable, and the Crows still played their rolling game, but now tiredness became a factor, and mistakes mattered. Having kicked themselves into it, the Bulldogs kicked themselves out of it.

Still, at the 22-minute mark of the last quarter, the scores were level, and two fables still competed. Appropriately, Walker won it, bouncing his way down the wing, then centreing for Cameron and the clinching goal. The final siren was a dagger to the hearts of the Bulldogs. But if they proved anything this year, it was that metaphorical death is merely a setback. When does 2016 begin?