Nobody would have blamed Alex Chidiac for giving up, or for — having seen the ball spin away up the field — letting her arms drop by her sides, her aching legs ease to a shuffle.

The game was almost over, after all, and Melbourne Victory were exhausted.

They'd just played half their A-League Women season in the space of a month, and had barely scraped into fourth spot after squeezing a point out of a scrappy 0-0 draw with Canberra on the final day.

It was miraculous, really, that they made it this far at all, let alone to the 92nd minute of Sunday's elimination semi-final with a 2-1 lead against an in-form Adelaide team.

But slow down is not what Chidiac did. Even with her calves burning and sweat stinging her eyes, she watched the ball she'd just cleared from her own penalty area and decided, instead, to sprint after it.

She covered half the field in a few seconds. Adelaide forward Shadeene Evans threw her body in front of the Victory midfielder to try to halt her progress, but Chidiac just shoved her aside and kept going.

Chidiac was at the half-way line by the time Emily Hodgson had set herself to ping the ball back into the box, at which point Chidiac threw her entire body in front of the left-back and deflected the pass back in-field.

Then she got up and did it again, sprinting into Adelaide's defensive half to pressure Emma Stanbury. In the end, it mattered little: Stanbury stepped around Chidiac and sent a hopeful ball forwards, but it also came to nothing.

It probably won't be remembered by many, that stoppage-time sprint. But, in that pocket of time, Chidiac seemed to personify Melbourne Victory's entire season. It has been a season made memorable not by the football they played — which was dishevelled and inconsistent, for the most part — but for their insistence to simply keep going. To grind it out. To find a way, any way, to get as far as they could, even though their squad was being held together by little more than staples, glue and the bandages of hope.

The reigning champions were handicapped from the very start of this A-League Women season.

They started their campaign without lethal goal-scorer Melina Ayres, who had been sidelined with a hamstring injury. They lost their captain, Kayla Morrison, to an ACL injury after the first game and struggled for the first half of the season to replace her.

Chidiac was one of several players to contract COVID-19 and took longer than expected to return to fitness — even struggling to breathe up until the final regular-season game.

Veteran midfielder Amy Jackson tore her calf, while young star Kyra Cooney-Cross was omitted due to yellow card accumulation.

Towards the season's end, it felt as though Victory were crawling, bruised and bleeding.

Indeed, that was the overwhelming feeling to Sunday's game: fatigue.

For all the things both teams could control — recovery, hydration, tactics, rest — their football was nonetheless affected by the decisions made elsewhere.

The 3:30pm kick-off time in Adelaide — a requirement of the APL's broadcasting arrangement — meant this must-win game was played in 32-degree Celsius heat.

That oppressive heat was clear from the start, flattening the tempo, tiring the players faster and forcing drinks breaks in both halves that interrupted play.

The game itself suffered as a result, with long stretches of forgettable football broken up by rare glimpses of action at either end.

It was the extreme antithesis to Friday night's chaotic 4-2 major semi-final between Sydney FC and Melbourne City, played in the cooler Sydney evening and at an increasingly frantic pace over the course of 120 unforgettable minutes.

That's not to say Sunday's semi-final didn't have the potential to live up to the billing, though.

This was Adelaide's first ever finals appearance after 14 long, desperate seasons filled with restarts and rebuilds, with historic winless streaks — 34 games between 2008 and 2011 — and a reputation that became part of the game's vocabulary: "doing an Adelaide".

But this season was different because 2021-22 was the latest iteration of a longer project the club had begun in 2017, with the arrival of former head coach Ivan Karlović.

Before that, the Reds' women's team was in chaos: The club had cycled through four head coaches in three years, including one that lasted less than a month. They held the record for the joint-biggest loss three seasons running, and there was an overriding sense that the club and the team did not know who they wanted to be.

Karlović helped change that. He pivoted the club's recruitment towards developing local South Australian players, handing over a dozen debuts to teenagers with little more than state league experience under their cleats, before becoming the club's inaugural Head of Women's Football.

Now, many of the players he ushered in — Dylan Holmes, Emily Condon, Isobel Hodgson, Matilda McNamara, Chelsie Dawber — are in their early 20s, and this season have taken the club to history-making heights.

Not only did they finish third for the first time, but the football they played to get there was, at times, sublime.

This consistent core, complemented by a handful of internationals, finally clicked. Their football was ruthless, choreographed, filled with style and swagger.

Strikers Fiona Worts and Dawber finished first and second on the Golden Boot ladder, while their defence conceded the third-fewest goals across the league.

Their 8-2 demolition of Brisbane Roar and 3-0 defeat of Victory in their inaugural Pride Games are particularly notable performances, the coalescing of so much work off the field in recent years.

They had every reason to feel confident coming into Sunday's elimination semi-final against a Victory side that had won just one of their past six games.

But finals football is a different beast and, for teams who have been there before, there is a fight-or-flight response that kicks in, willing them forwards even when all stats and predictions suggest the opposite.

And so it did.

But not in the same way its swashbuckling, gasp-inducing predecessor did two nights earlier.

There were moments when it threatened to teeter into classic territory, like when Adelaide midfielder Nanako Sasaki scored a goal-of-the-season free kick to equalise in the first half.

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But it was, for the most part, a slower burn, a reminder that for every match filled with heart-racing, fist-clenching drama, there is another that is largely an exercise in persistence, in grit, in an almost stubborn refusal to give in.

And so Adelaide's fairytale season came to an end, not with a bang but with a Melina Ayres volley at the far post.

The rest of the match, as the broadcast commentator said, was "a masterclass in winding the clock down".

It was where the weathered experience of this Victory team — encapsulated in players such as Chidiac, Privitelli, Ayres, Amy Jackson and Casey Dumont — triumphed over the energetic naivety of an Adelaide team who had never reached this stage before, but who now know what this is like and, perhaps more importantly, what it takes.

Sometimes it takes great football. But most of the time, what it takes is what was captured in that 92nd minute sprint from Chidiac.

That is the stuff that sport is made from: the decision to keep going, to endure, to outlast. It may not be glamorous, but it is necessary, and teaches us more about the players than about the game. You learn that, sometimes, it is simply down to who can survive.

And, in an A-League Women season as difficult and wearying as this one, maybe that is a virtue worth celebrating all the same.