When the final siren sounds in grand finals, celebrations always take centre stage as they rightfully should.

If you step aside amid the rush, dotting the background is the embodiment of heartache. The players, head in hands, often sitting on the playing arena but always completely spent.

It can be extremely difficult to cover as a sports journalist, running from rooms filled with elation to ones of complete devastation.

Most of us journos have feelings like compassion. Empathy even, if we’ve been there ourselves.

Grand finals in any sport at every level have a big build-up. 

Covering grand finals as journalists, we sharpen an even closer eye on teams and preparations.

This means we also know how acutely tough the pain of coming so close but finishing runner-up can be. The stories that might have been. The unwritten fairytale endings.

Tough breaks are not confined to grand final day either. Injury and the selection-table chop can end grand final dreams early too.

Hawthorn veteran Brad Sewell is named to play in a grand final this weekend. A Victorian Football League grand final. This could be bittersweet for Sewell.

Sewell was axed from the Hawks’ preliminary final team, set to meet Port Adelaide on Saturday night, to help make room for creative defender Matt Suckling.

The 30-year-old Sewell, a former North Ballarat Rebel, has played in every final Hawthorn has made (16, including two AFL premierships) in his 11 years at the club.

Instead, Sewell has been named for the Hawks’ VFL arm, Box Hill – a team Sewell strongly supports as he has repeatedly made clear in past columns he has written for The Courier.

Whether the Hawks make the AFL final, and whether Sewell can break back into the team, is another story but should he take to the field for Box Hill, know he will be fighting hard for grand final glory every chance he gets.

Bungaree made the late recall of backman Mitch Bruns that paid off in its Central Highlands senior football premiership last week. At the same time, the Demons had to give late notice to the guy whose spot Bruns would take – a player who had been preparing for grand final action.

North Ballarat City and Ballarat Swans have each made changes for this weekend’s Ballarat Football League grand final.

City’s Derick Micallef and ruckman Tristan Cartledge, who were left on the outer, injured for the club’s maiden BFL premiership last season, gain a second chance. 

Micallef told The Courier this week that merely watching on had been one of the hardest days of his life.

Grand finals are unbelievably tough to reach and even tougher to win. This is what largely makes premiership medallions so coveted and what makes missing out on them so narrowly that unbearable to swallow.

melanie.whelan@fairfaxmedia.com.au