GONE. Can't make it. Mathematically possible. There's a lot of jargon tied up with AFL football, but it's doubtful you're going to hear any stock phrases repeated more often than those three over the last seven weeks of this season.

The finals countdown is on. And as the clubs continue to chant "one game at a time", everyone else is dusting off the calculators and scanning the fixtures weeks in advance, trying to sort out the likely invitees to the big September party.

It's always a difficult task — one tougher than usual this year given the apparent evenness of the competition, the rampant Geelong aside, and a roll call of up to 12 teams still with realistic finals aspirations.

But while much could happen yet in a season full of surprises, it hasn't prevented the finals undertaker already being called to drag away the carcasses. Specifically those of the Brisbane Lions, pronounced dead long ago, Fremantle and St Kilda.

The Lions remain twitching, however, as do even the Dockers. And it might prove a very premature call in the Saints' case, considering their steadily improving form and a handy run home.

St Kilda plays Carlton, a Western Bulldogs outfit that it has clearly had the wood over in recent times, and in the final three weeks of the season, Fremantle and West Coast, both at Telstra Dome, then Richmond.

One thing season 2007 should already have taught us is that in the football prediction game, it's very dangerous to talk in absolutes. Particularly when they concern the Kangaroos.

Without naming names (they know who they are and I have to work with them), eight of 14 pundits surveyed in The Age's "Footy 2007" magazine in March tipped Dean Laidley's side as wooden-spooners.

That's a fair bit of egg to spread around some embarrassed faces. Yet would Laidley himself have believed his Roos would be sitting third on the table this deep into the season? Or, for that matter, would Alastair Clarkson have dreamed of Hawthorn in second spot?

I suspect St Kilda might miss out, but only just, and unluckily, potentially the first team under the final eight system to win 13 games and still not make it, thanks to a poor percentage.

So who else wins and loses in a crystal-balling exercise undertaken now? As admirable as the Hawks and Kangaroos have been, I can see Collingwood climbing from sixth to leapfrog both and finish as high as second.

It's far from fantasy when you consider a draw that has the Pies playing six of their last seven games at the MCG, the opponents including the Brisbane Lions, Carlton, Richmond and Melbourne, Sydney — against whom they've won their past two — and Adelaide in the final round at Telstra Dome.

That's a game the Crows could conceivably lose and still finish as high as sixth, with an already healthy percentage and four games left at AAMI Stadium.

If Adelaide does barge into the eight, it might be at the expense of the Bulldogs, whose run home takes in four of the top eight, the Crows away in a potential pre-finals elimination final, and nemesis St Kilda.

All speculation, which this year more than most could go horribly awry. You can't count on many certainties in AFL football any more.

Except perhaps another catchphrase — "who would have thought?" — being used even more than "mathematically possible" should this predicted final ladder hold true. Which would mean that in a real flashback, four Victorian teams would end up filling the top four.