IN Sliding Doors, the movie, Gwyneth Paltrow's character squeezes onto a departing train, meets a handsome stranger, arrives home to find her boyfriend in bed with his ex, then lives happily ever after with aforementioned stranger.

Or, simultaneously, she misses the train, gets mugged, just misses catching her Lothario lover in the act, and carries on none the wiser.

And then there's Sliding Doors, the preliminary final.

In the reality, a gallant Collingwood is within five points of Geelong at the final siren. Just over a week later, the Cats end a 44-year premiership drought with a record-breaking grand final win, and eight months on are an unbeaten force whose uncontracted players are shunning the prospect of bigger bucks to be part of the destiny that surely beckons.

But what of the parallel universe?

Somewhere, somehow, in the footballing maelstrom played before 98,002 people on that September Friday night at the MCG, the Magpies find another goal. Just one more straight kick.

The following Saturday afternoon, football's most famous club betters Port Adelaide to win its 15th premiership. Nathan Buckley, his battle-scarred hamstring coerced into one more outing, is nursed to the prize he craves more than any other. Mick Malthouse has a third flag as coach, and true legend status. The streets of Carringbush are awash with Joffa-like figures, who won't go home for weeks.

Eight months later, Mark Thompson is coaching Essendon. In Geelong, the football club lists dangerously under a weight of expectation that has ballooned into a 45th flag-free year. Soon-to-be-uncontracted players hedge their bets, stalling negotiations until season's end. People shuffle through the streets, eyes downcast, muttering darkly.

EDDIE McGuire chuckles at the idea of all that a single goal could have changed, but won't entertain the lost possibility that has tortured so many Collingwood fans. "As far as I am concerned, we finished fourth last year, and we lost a preliminary final by five points to a team that deserved its victory."

It proved to be Buckley's 280th and last AFL game, and in the first puncturing of the fantasy, the former captain wouldn't have played in the grand final anyway, having pinged his chronic hamstring with three minutes to go. As for the prospect of a 15th Magpie flag, with or without him, Buckley's response is dead-pan: "And Port Adelaide could have won their second premiership."

Thompson is not given to an imaginative reworking of history, either, and is quite content with how the events of September 21 panned out, thanks very much. In 100 years, he says, Collingwood people who are still cursing the one that got away "still won't have won that preliminary final".

But his president, Frank Costa — adopting a more detached perspective while holidaying with family in Italy — admitted this week he had entertained the gloomy alternative "many, many times".

"If Collingwood had beaten us, the result for Geelong the city, Geelong the football club, and Geelong the supporter and membership base would have been absolutely demoralising," Costa said. "It would have been equally as devastating to the morale of the city as the win was uplifting. It would have been just terrible."

Preliminary final week had begun well for the Cats, who had a record nine players named in the All-Australian team on the Monday night. Collingwood, to much black-and-white angst, had not been deemed worthy of even a single player in the initial squad of 40. But by Friday, after a noticeably flat week on the track, doubts were surfacing.

"It was the first time for the whole year that the result really mattered," captain Tom Harley said in the recently released inside story of the 2007 flag, The Mission. "… it was like, 'S---, if we lose, we're out'."

For Collingwood, there was extra motivation. On the Tuesday, its great ruckman Len Thompson had died, aged only 60. McGuire took an emotional Des Tuddenham, Thompson's first captain, into the rooms, then out onto the MCG before the game. "He did so much for Thommo," McGuire said. "To see Tuddy in the rooms, it had been such a hard week for him …"

The Magpies were hellbent on a fitting tribute, and an early dropped mark by Harley hinted that their opponents might be sufficiently off-beam to help provide it. McGuire sensed they had sniffed danger. "You get to that position, come up against a team that's coached by Mick Malthouse in front of 98,000 people … it doesn't matter who you are, if you don't feel the pressure of the occasion, you're unique."

Buckley, whose influence belied the fact it was only his fifth game of the season, remembers the pressure being enormous, with all conscious that Geelong's ball-winners could not "squeeze out of the stoppages too easily". The captain laid nine tackles for the night, Shane O'Bree 10 and Nick Maxwell 11.

He reflects on the clash now as "another pretty good Collingwood performance in a big game without getting the result … we've had too many of those". But he will stretch to one "what-if" moment, which he was none-too-pleased to be reminded of in a reel of Geelong highlights at this year's season launch.

Paul Medhurst had just put the Magpies back in front 17 minutes into the third quarter, when Chris Bryan marked and played on 40 metres from goal. He might have put the Pies two kicks clear for the only time in the match, but 150th-gamer Joel Corey produced the play of the night, diving over his boot to smother and somehow springing back up with the ball in his arms.

"If he hadn't done that desperate act …" Buckley wonders. "The ball was already off the boot — was that kick going to be a goal? Is that as small as the difference was? Well, that's exactly what the difference was."

McGuire recalls another moment, with just eight minutes remaining, when Brad Ottens and Gary Ablett combined at a boundary throw-in, conjuring the most space seen at a contest all night and Ablett screwing home the game's best and most telling goal. "There's all those things that stick in your mind, (but for) Collingwood supporters, it's bad enough worrying about what-ifs in grand finals without stretching it to preliminary finals."

Still, the denouement almost stilled hearts.

Costa remembers seeing Anthony Rocca — whose shoulder injury would probably have sidelined him the next week, too — go down in a marking contest, and Medhurst step up to take the shot at goal. "He'll kick this jolly thing," Costa thought, and he was right. Less than a minute remained.

"That was the longest 58 seconds of my life. I just kept flashing back to Sydney (in the 2005 second semi-final), and how with three seconds to go, (Nick) Davis got that goal. The ball can come any way out of the centre, and it often does …"

This time, it spilled to the wing and eventually out of bounds. Alan Didak squeezed a kick to half-forward from the restart, where it bounced into the arms of Jimmy Bartel, who made a split-second decision to take possession and go to ground. A pack of players enveloped him. A limelight-seeking official might have paid holding the ball, but a bounce was called. And then came the siren.

PAINTED on the back of the Brownlow Stand at Skilled Stadium is a bulb illustrating Geelong's membership, which will soon be updated to 36,250 — a club record. If that one more Collingwood goal had come, Costa knows it would be many fewer.

"We've been very fortunate in Geelong that, for so long, through five lost grand finals, the supporters and members have stuck with us. Now, if we'd lost that one, I don't know if we could have expected those people to stick with us again."

Costa believes the club would have kept Thompson, who had put off contract talks until his team's season was over. "(But) whether Mark would have wanted to stay — because he would have been absolutely knocked rotten — I'm not sure."

In the stands at the grand final, McGuire watched with mixed emotions; he could see his wife's father and brother, lifelong Cats, living the dream as the greatest exorcism imaginable was played out before them. "You're angry, disappointed, heartbroken at times, envious, all those things. But once we were out of it, I was delighted for them."

Buckley was there, too, feeling terrible. "You just thought, 'Jeez, we didn't see that from Geelong the week before'," he said of the Cats' demolition of Port Adelaide. "But we cost ourselves a crack at it (the premiership), that's all."