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The winners wore the expressions of losers. So did the losers.
Only Alex Rance, the Richmond defender whose season had come to a stop an hour or so after it began when his knee crumpled beneath him, had a convincing smile.
"I'm in a great team with a great culture so I don't have too much to be sad about," Rance told a TV boundary line reporter moments after the siren signalled Richmond's 33-point win over Carlton.
The fact that Rance was on the boundary supporting his team, let alone sharing his thoughts with the TV interrogator, was poignant.
We have a tendency to catastrophise these moments; to lose all sense of reason.
In the footballing context, Rance is the pillar of the flag favourite's defence. He is an incredibly strong, skilful and intuitive footballer who might be one of the few "unlosable" players in the competition.
This was proven in 2017 when Rance was a lynchpin of Richmond's premiership team; and again last season in a different way when Rance suffered a rare personal drubbing during the Tigers' demoralising defeat to Collingwood in the preliminary final.
So the sight of the brilliant defender being helped from the ground had consequences beyond that of almost any player in the AFL.
This was a potentially flag-defining moment. A footballing tragedy/disaster/catastrophe.
In these moments we expect sportsmen to respond in the manner we prescribe. We need them to act out their personal trauma to validate our melodramatic script and assumed importance of the moment. Otherwise sport becomes mere make believe.
And yet here was Rance on the boundary line encouraging his teammates with a smile on his face instead of seeking the sanctuary of the sheds.
Here was Rance rising to his feet — crutch-assisted — after the final siren to cheer the winning team from the ground, still beaming.
Here was Rance speaking in that friendly, measured tone to the boundary line reporter having already been told the initial diagnosis was grim. Or at least "grim" in the traditional way we have always considered a season-ending knee.
No tears in his eyes, no lump in his throat.
On a night when the AFL unveiled several rules changes we had expected to see something different. We were promised players romping into space created by designated starting position, more technical infringements and even goal-post Snicko.
But it turned out the most unusual moment was the sight of a brilliant footballer accepting without a hint of self-pity or remorse a diagnosis that has quite understandably crushed others.
Maybe this wasn't surprising to those who know Rance — he is reportedly a committed Christian with a worldly outlook who has hinted more than once that he would walk away from the game at the peak of his career to explore life's other options.
Regardless, Rance's injury, and the sanguine manner in which he accepted his fate, were the talking points of a season-opener that only lived up to its billing if you had observed the fixture that has had a habit of disappointing in recent years.
This anticlimax was not that particularly surprising.
Continuing to schedule the now-impressive Richmond against the serially dismal Carlton has been like mixing a fine aged Scotch with dishwater and settling back to enjoy the perfect pre-dinner drink. Disappointment is guaranteed.
Thursday night's iteration provided an unusual but still routinely unsatisfying variation on the new well-worn opening-night theme — Richmond wins, Carlton loses, and everyone looks forward to Friday night.
In this case, Richmond's victory was not convincing enough to hail a clear-cut premiership favourite, particularly given Rance's injury.
But nor was Carlton's so-so performance good enough to suggest its young team had come of age or poor enough to predict the Blues would add to their impressive collection of kitchen cutlery.
Instead, let's be brutally frank — or in the spirit of the week, @BrutalFrank. If the AFL's opening game had been a female footballer, it would have been mercilessly trolled.
Scrappy skills, low-scoring despite the new rules and — even allowing for a short lived Carlton fightback — an inevitably lopsided result.
The Blues scored just one point in the first quarter. Even those troglodytes who were triggered by the sight of Carlton's AFLW star Tayla Harris daring to kick the ball with incredible athleticism would have agreed this was a far more offensive Blues performance.
The first round of the AFL season is traditionally about selling hope, an essential element in a competition where, if the draft/salary cap cycle works perfectly fans will have to wait 18 years between premierships.
In this case, Carlton might hope that a decent fightback and an inflated 34-point margin provide hope that it will not always rely so heavily on the incredible efforts of its Herculian midfielder Patrick Cripps.
Richmond might hope that losing Rance in the first round at least gives it the chance to groom a replacement over the season as the Western Bulldogs did in 2016 when they lost captain Bob Murphy in the early going.
Premiership rivals will wish Rance no ill, while privately hoping his absence makes the Tigers more "gettable" and their own chances of glory are greater.
The rest of us will marvel at Rance's resilience and spirit and hope the rest of the season provides much better entertainment than the first instalment.
The first round AFL action and all the week's other big sports stories will be discussed in detail on Offsiders at 10:00am Sunday on ABC TV.
Topics: australian-football-league, sport, melbourne-3000
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