When you're trying to look at the bigger picture as a football coach, sometimes it can be not just about whether you win, but about how you win. And conversely, as unlikely as it may sound, sometimes a loss can be a good thing.
That was the position in which Brisbane coach Chris Fagan found himself when his side met Collingwood at home during the recent Easter Round.
The Lions were undefeated at 5-0, but without having played particularly well, none of those victories coming by any more than 28 points. They'd conceded their two highest scores of the season in the previous two games. Come the clash against the Pies, Fagan had a sense of dread.
"It was a bit difficult for me to coach the boys, they'd won 10 in a row at that stage including a grand final. I'm thinking: 'They're probably not going to listen to me until we lose'," Fagan said this week on Fox Footy. The coach even admitted he'd expected his team to have clocked up a couple of losses by then.
But that defeat did duly occur as Collingwood thumped the reigning premier by 52 points, the Lions' heaviest defeat for a year.
"That was the opportunity to raise that issue and to do some work on it and shine a light on it," Fagan said. "It was good because the evidence was there, three weeks in a row we let the opposition score too easily. We needed to do something about it."
And the Lions certainly have. Their last two wins over St Kilda and Gold Coast have produced statistically two of Brisbane's best three defensive performances of the season, the upshot that they head into Sunday's game against North Melbourne with a 7-1 win-loss record a game clear on top of the ladder.
And one-third of the way through the AFL season, that statistic is in itself, in the current football environment, a significant landmark.
That the competition is a more volatile entity these days is a given, the record of recent defending premiers proof enough.
In 21 seasons between 2000 and 2020, only once (in 2017) did a reigning premier fail to reach finals the following season. But it's happened now three times in the last four years, Richmond in 2021, Geelong in 2023 and Collingwood last year all in mothballs by September.
Indeed, the only exception in that period, Melbourne, is an interesting case study in itself with some parallels to Brisbane's start. Because while the Demons followed up their 2021 premiership by winning their first 10 games of 2022, they did so without looking anywhere near as dominant as they'd proved at the business end of the previous season.
Melbourne lacked that ruthless edge which had defined its march to that drought-breaking 2021 flag, going out of the finals in straight sets.
Fagan will be all over that comparison, given he coached Brisbane to the semifinal win which knocked the Demons out, the Lions finishing all over a side good enough to reach top four purely on talent, but with its systems and motivation levels just a little questionable.
That Collingwood loss for Brisbane, though, really might have been perfect timing, perhaps a football equivalent of the 'recession we had to have' as then Federal treasurer Paul Keating famously quipped in 1990.
Things are also on the up for the Lions in terms of personnel. With the exception of Lincoln McCarthy, out for the rest of the season after rupturing his anterior cruciate ligament for a second time within 12 months, and on-going concussion concern Brandon Starcevich, the Lions have virtually all hands on deck.
That includes a couple of potentially huge inclusions to the mix, too, neither of whom were available during last September's premiership assault, in Keidean Coleman and former Adelaide backman Tom Doedee, still to play a premiership match for Brisbane.
They've also got three of their next four games against opponents outside the current top eight in North Melbourne, Melbourne and Essendon, with a very real prospect of Brisbane getting to the mid-point of the season 11-1 or 10-2, remembering that last year they had just four wins on the board after 11 games.
Importantly, there's still plenty of scope for improvement, with the Lions ranked only seventh for both offence and defence.
That's only marginally outside the general parameters of a top six ranking in either category for the vast majority of premiership teams, though. And the strongest suit, the midfield, is ticking over nicely, Brisbane ranked fifth or higher in five out of six midfield statistical areas, clearance and contest differentials the standouts.
For Fagan, that means, the foundations are solid enough to have confidence, but things aren't going so well that any sort of cracking of the whip would feel more performative than necessary to the playing group.
It's quite possibly the perfect position for a defending premier to be in at this stage of a season. And if Brisbane was capable of winning the flag from fifth last year, you'd like its chances of making it back-to-back from here.
You can read more of Rohan Connolly's work at FOOTYOLOGY.