THE 2008 grand final will be written in sporting history as the day the champion cracked under pressure from a relentless and youthful challenger.

Hawthorn, the team that almost lost its jumper and its soul only 12 years ago, ended one of the great September contests with a stunning upset and a 26-point victory over the supposedly invincible Geelong. The Hawks' fairytale was written in front of a magical crowd of 100,012, a number the MCG elders said would never happen.

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It would be overstating matters to say the 2008 grand final had everything, but as an occasion, as a contest and as a story, it was close to perfect. The margin was not close at the finish — the Hawks' 10th flag seemed beyond doubt when a relatively low-key Lance Franklin played on to kick a stunning goal (but only his second) almost halfway through the last quarter — but high drama accompanied the match almost until the end.

Luke Hodge, whose suspect body was regularly and systematically tested by the Cats' Max Rooke, won the Norm Smith Medal and joked in the brown-and-gold-drenched rooms after the game: "Ribs? What ribs."

The champion Gary Ablett, whose father had won the medal in a losing team 19 years ago, watched the victory presentation with tears in his eyes and his teammates sat around him in shock and disbelief.

One week earlier, a tearful Robert Harvey had said farewell to football after an epic 21-year career, having never achieved the game's ultimate success.

Yesterday Shane Crawford proved that dreams actually can come true when he won a premiership with his first grand final and 305th game. Football's ultimate performer provided more than the odd patch of brilliance at the grand old age of 34 and quipped into the microphone after the game: "That's what I'm talking about."

Captain Sam Mitchell and coach Alastair Clarkson thanked all the right people and were gracious in victory but both Hawk leaders unwittingly rubbed salt into the Cats' wounds by stating that Geelong was the best team of the past two seasons. "We have used their club as a role model," said Clarkson, whose team is ominously the third youngest in the AFL and who has achieved a flag in his fourth AFL season. Clarkson thanked one of Hawthorn's key saviours in former president and the man who employed him, Ian Dicker, but not — at least before the crowd — the incumbent Jeff Kennett.

Not that the former premier needed to be thanked. Long before the final siren Kennett was high-fiving colleagues in the Olympic stand and soon afterwards he began dancing a jig. When the siren sounded he donned the brown and gold jacket. This was the Hawks' first flag in 17 years, Geelong's third loss in 45 games in a performance that reaped the team a prophetic 89 points, matching the year these two clubs had last played off for the big one. Who would have thought the Cats, with their generals Ablett, Cameron Ling and Matthew Scarlett playing such superb football, would have crumbled so. Still, the first half was as thrilling as football has been all year in front of the biggest grand final crowd in 22 years.

Mark Thompson suggested some selfishness had crept into Geelong's game. "I thought today we didn't play consistently well enough as a team. There were some people who were just going against what we planned to do … Maybe if the game was played next week we'd probably do it better and beat the Hawks. On this day, they've got the points and the premiership and they thoroughly deserve it. But it doesn't mean we panic and be ruthless and sack people and just forget about what we've done. We're still a very very good club."

It was the racehorse with football's finest pedigree who created the defining moment. Cyril Rioli had already ignited his team with a series of running, bouncing bursts in the first half when midway through the third quarter he became David to three Geelong Goliaths on the Cats' half-forward flank.

The 19-year-old nephew of two Norm Smith medallists beat Darren Milburn, Corey Enright and Max Rooke, drawing rapturous applause from the jam-packed Hawk fans, the theatre-goers and the senior coach. Four goals in five minutes — Rioli, Dew, Williams and Dew again — followed for the Hawks.

When Rioli attacked the ball as though it was his alone the Hawks led by a solitary goal after a first half in which the lead had changed five times. Eight minutes later they led by 30. Only two late goals by the shellshocked Cats — and there were tens of thousands of them sitting stunned around the MCG — kept the defending champions alive going into the last quarter.

Trent Croad, the club's seasoned defender and prodigal son who returned from a two-year exile to Fremantle having secured the club the No. 1 pick in the national draft in Hodge, was lost to the team 11 minutes into the second quarter when his broken ankle broke down completely.

Croad thought twice before being slowly marched off, limping back into position to deliver one final heavy bump to opponent Joel Selwood. When finals star Clinton Young limped up the race early in the third quarter having been eliminated by his damaged ankle the Hawks faced the Greatest Team Of All with only 20 able men. Danger man Chance Bateman was also hurt, having had his shoulder strapped after a damaging opening.

If there was another statement it was made by Stuart Dew, the overweight so-called has-been who defied Hawthorn's long-term plan by returning from AFL exile to win his second premiership. Late in the third quarter the 29-year-old Dew combined with Williams for Williams' third goal, with the two men working together as if their lives depended on it, simply refusing the Cats access to their forward set-up, or their goal square. Dew's goals came on either side of that hardest of hard labour.

Alastair Clarkson was chosen by the Hawks because he was a teacher but he is also a fighter and Clarkson has fought dozens of battles since taking on the job four years ago. Drafting Dew was one of those in which he claimed victory and he would have enjoyed that passage of play.

But in the latter stages of the first half the eventual premiers seemed perilously suspended by a hanging thread. Their captain Sam Mitchell had been undisciplined and uninvolved, shut down by Cameron Ling who demonstrated yet again why the AFL must take a long hard look at its all-Australian team selection. Mitchell had given away more free kicks than he had had possessions, Matthew Scarlett had silenced Franklin and of the three forward musketeers only Mark Williams looked dangerous.

When the two teams met in their round-17 classic it was the Hawks' bad kicking that helped the Cats. Yesterday Geelong's work in front of goal was woeful and as Hawthorn faced the second quarter onslaught the record crowd was repeatedly stunned as the likes of Brad Ottens, Tom Lonergan — who seemed to have written yet another chapter of his fairytale comeback when he kicked the opening goal of the game — Matthew Stokes and the shattered Cameron Mooney, who missed a sitter from point blank range almost on half time and another in the first minute of the second half. Geelong kick 1.9 in the second quarter and memories of North Melbourne's loss to Adelaide a decade earlier loomed ominously.

In the week that led up to this classic play-off it had been the Cats who had loomed ominously. Most experts said that Hawthorn could not win, that the challenger had achieved its goal by reaching the final and that Geelong was too tough, too strong and that its midfield was unbeatable. Outside the MCG before the game the bookies were offering $3.00 straight up for the Hawks. Interestingly, Hodge said after the game: "We do know when to slow down the game when we have to and shut down teams." In other words the Hawks have more than one trick up their sleeve but yesterday the Cats had only one and nowhere to turn when the clangers exposed them.

But Geelong had left its best at home. Its invincibles fumbled, turned over the ball and kicked atrociously and wastefully. In the second quarter the statisticians would have it that Geelong was thrashing Hawthorn everywhere but on the scoreboard but by the final quarter it was the Cats who looked spent. "Sorry we couldn't do the business today," apologised Tom Harley from the podium after the game as his stunned teammates sat looking on. Harley promised the Cats fans their team would work hard over the summer and come back here next year. After all, this was the team predicted to create a dynasty, perhaps a Brisbanesque three-peat.

But football — sport for that matter — doesn't always work out like that. Just ask the Kevin Sheedy-James Hird-led Essendon team of 2000 and 2001. Or Hawthorn, whose game plan predicted a premiership by 2010. No one was complaining yesterday that the game plan had moved out of whack. Clarkson and his team had executed a modern victory, the first from a team that had bottomed out and fully rebuilt with the best youth the draft had to offer. The coach acknowledged that when he thanked the club elders and assistants who had had faith in his plan.

"I'll just say one more thing," said Clarkson from the victory dais, his smile almost stretching beyond his face. "We are a happy team at Hawthorn."