IT IS characteristic of a society hell-bent on instant gratification that a draw in a football match is looked upon as a non-result.

Always, a clamour goes up for extra time, notwithstanding that the match already has exhausted its allotted time and the players all their energies. Two draws at Telstra Dome, one last week and one this, have left some in apoplexy, believing that these were stories without endings.

But a draw is a result, as much as victory by one point or 60, but rarer. It says that neither team was good, bold or lucky enough to win on the day. Last week, the Western Bulldogs were careless enough to slip 19 points behind Richmond, which was not poised enough to hold that lead. Jake King's rushed behind, seemingly an incidental in its moment, became a turning point.

On Sunday, North Melbourne was not steely enough to defend a matchwinning lead against Sydney, but the Swans were not cool enough to capitalise on the last four shots of the match, all of them behinds. Michael Firrito's desperate effort to touch Brett Kirk's scudding left-footer on the line became heroic.

In each, the finale was compelling. No one on the ground knew how much or little time remained, a blessing that ought to kill off the idea of a scoreboard countdown clock forever. Each team knew only that however much time it had to score, so did the opposition.

Footballers had to make fine, but instant calculations about risk, with only their nerve and instincts to guide them, for the match by now was beyond the manipulations of the coaches. Players threw themselves maniacally at the each other and the ball, intent on heroics, but acutely aware that one errant touch might give the game to the other side.

At the final siren, emotions palpably competed, on the field and in the stands: relief that it was not defeat, disappointment that it was not victory, confusion showing on all faces. Vivid footage was screened last week of Richmond's Nathan Brown seemingly in misapprehended victory celebration and this week, North's Brent Harvey and Jade Rawlings erroneously triumphant. These were raw moments.

Compare the drama that ensued with the now typical finish to an AFL game, when the leading team makes no effort to move the ball forward and the trailing team too often makes only a token effort to win it back. It is often a hollow experience.

Compare it with the end of a tied rugby league match, when there is extra time and so the urgency is of a lower order. Self-preservation rules. As much as a man wants to be hero, even more does he not want to be a villain.

Compare it with the end of a tied soccer match in a knockout competition, in which both teams frequently look to resign themselves to extra time. Further, with all the run drained from the players' legs and the ideas from their minds, extra time as often as not becomes an anticlimax, and sometimes is simply tedious.

This would be no less of a problem in AFL. North coach Dean Laidley said after Sunday's standstill that two of his key forwards had seized up and were unable to move. It is problematic whether extra time would have been as celestial as some imagine.

Nonetheless, provision for extra time in finals and knockout competitions is fair enough. In the AFL, it is impossible in the schedule to make room for replays. In a knockout match or a final, the business of the match is strictly between the two teams. Each has had the same time and chances, each has the same wear and tear.

But the matches at Telstra Dome the past two Sundays were two of an interlocking set of 176 in the AFL fixture, each with consequences for all the others. In nearly all, the two teams will sort out a winner in the allocated time. In the rare instance when they do not, it is incongruous that they be given more time than any other pairing, with all the implications that entails for the ladder. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose — and sometimes you do neither.

As it is, the two draws have spiced up the table agreeably. Sydney coach Paul Roos said that a draw was like a win anyway; it puts you two points ahead of the next team. But it is also like a loss; it puts you two points behind as well. The rest of the season now becomes, in part, an intrigue about whether, for the teams involved, they will prove to be two points gained or two forfeited. If there is to be gratification for one, it has been properly delayed. The draw has its own place in the folklore of the game.

Also last weekend, we rejoiced in the staging of the Anzac Day game. Some of the mystique has built up since its first showcase staging in 1995, which drew the second-biggest home-and-away crowd in history. Memorably, Essendon and Collingwood played one another to an epic standstill. But had Nathan Buckley kicked a last-gasp behind that day, or Saverio Rocca a match-sealing 10th, would we dwell upon it in quite the same way?