Brisbane Lions take a third straight premiership, by seven points at the MCG

The Brisbane Lions won a third consecutive AFL premiership on 26 September, beating Fremantle by seven points at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. The score was 14.12 (96) to 12.17 (89). The crowd was 100,023. Fremantle led by 17 points with under five minutes to play. Brisbane kicked four unanswered goals and closed a month in which the same ground had already staged the competition's first wildcard finals and the first regular-season NFL game played in Australia.

The three-peat puts the Lions in rare company. Melbourne is the only other club to have won more than one three-peat in VFL and AFL history, in 1939-41 and 1955-57. Brisbane's run is the first of the national era to reach three. The preliminary final a week earlier, against Hawthorn, had already been a high-scoring escape: Brisbane 20.11 (131) to Hawthorn 19.8 (122), in front of 97,835. The Grand Final was tighter and later. A side that can win a preliminary by nine points in a shootout and a Grand Final by seven after trailing late is not relying on one pattern of game.

Will Ashcroft finished with 31 disposals, 12 of them in the last quarter. Logan Morris kicked two goals in that quarter, the ones that turned the margin. Fremantle's Shai Bolton won the Norm Smith Medal as best afield. He is the first player to take the medal in a losing Grand Final since Chris Judd in 2005. The medal vote and the scoreboard diverged, which is what a 17-point lead with five minutes left tends to produce if the leader does not close. Bolton's medal is a personal record. It is also a measure of how much of the match Fremantle controlled before the last five minutes.

The broadcast numbers sit beside the gate. Seven and 7plus recorded an average audience above 4.52 million and a reach above 6.5 million, the most watched Grand Final on the network's account. Kylie Minogue played the pre-game set. The month at the MCG had already included the wildcard round and the NFL fixture. The Grand Final was the one that filled the ground past 100,000. A crowd of that size at the MCG is the ordinary Grand Final gate. The audience figure is the one that moved: 4.52 million average, against a national population of about 27 million, is a share the code has not posted before on this broadcast measure.

Fremantle's path to the last Saturday was the club's first Grand Final. The loss does not erase that. It does fix the manner of it. Twelve goals and 17 behinds is a poor conversion line next to Brisbane's 14.12, and the 17 behinds are the points that were there to be scored before the last five minutes. In Australian football a behind is a point that missed. Seventeen of them is 17 points left on the table, more than twice the final margin. Brisbane's four late goals were the correction. Ashcroft's 12 last-quarter disposals are the count that explains how the ball kept arriving in the forward half.

The comeback also reframes the preliminary final. Hawthorn had pushed Brisbane to 122 points a week earlier and still lost. Fremantle led late and still lost. Two different opponents, two different score shapes, the same result in the last minutes. That is the pattern a three-peat is built on, more than any single disposal count. Clubs that win one flag often do it with a hot month. Clubs that win three have to keep a list intact through the draft, the trade period and the salary offers that follow each September.

A three-peat changes the list math for 2027. Premiership sides lose players to offers and to age. Brisbane has now held a core together across three Septembers, with Ashcroft and Morris still on the young side of the list. Fremantle has a Grand Final on the ledger and a medal winner who did not get the cup. The fixture that decided both was a seven-point game that was not a seven-point game until the last five minutes. The next list argument, in both club rooms, starts from that clock.