You might even add Brisbane in 2001. They were only a partial continuation of the Fitzroy team that had last won a premiership 57 years earlier, but Jonathan Brown did declare to the crowd at Brunswick Street the next morning: “I’m proud to be a Lion today - a Fitzroy Lion.”

The Dogs came from the clouds. My favourite memory of that day is of former player Neil Cordy in a corner of an MCG bar many hours later, still shaking his head. At the Whitten Oval the next day, players and fans alike still looked more stunned than anything else. It is still the most miraculous premiership of all.

The Swans were swaying all over the place in Albert Park the morning after their triumph. Geelong celebrated long and riotously, Richmond people overran Swan Street. The face of that flag was the tear-streaked Matthew Richardson’s.

Going back to last century, when Collingwood broke a 32-year drought in 1990, I don’t think coach Leigh Matthews quite realised what he had done until he was sitting on a bus taking the players to Victoria Park and inching through a crowd as deep as the eye could see on Johnston Street. The bus was rocking as delirious fans beat their hands on its sides.

The club grew by hundreds of thousands that night.

Repeats have a different tenor. After their third flag, Geelong presented as innocently as choir boys, dry of eye and liver. They were on a higher plane, with mark of greatness upon them, and it was enough. That’s an exclusive club-within-a-club. No one really ever becomes smug about premierships, but they do become knowing.

When Hawthorn paraded their cups at Glenferrie in 2015, coach Alastair Clarkson and captain Luke Hodge could hold only three between them, so they had to pretend the 2008 trophy belonged to a different era. It’s an even rarer club that has a premiership cup in reserve.

Richmond would acknowledge that the consecration of last year’s premiership fell a little flat because it was far from their fans, and at night. But at least it was their third in quick succession. Melbourne’s fate is for its finest modern hour to be two hours behind their fans. It gave Sunday in this city a hollower feeling than might have been expected.

The median age of the Australian population is 37. The second-longest drought among clubs (excluding expansion clubs Fremantle, GWS and Gold Coast) belongs to Carlton, 26 years long. To anyone who grew up in the ’70s, that’s a hard-to-compute fact. But it does mean that nearly every footy fan either has had the thrill of a premiership, or can reasonably expect to before it’s too late. There is enough winning for all, after all.

That leaves one club, the outlier, the perennial non-winner. It’s 55 years now for St Kilda (and another 93 barren years before that in all competitions, but we won’t go there). It’s not just the dearth. The other clubs played in few, or no, grand finals during their droughts. The Saints have played in five, and had chances in all except one. It makes them feel not just robbed, but victimised.

It marks St Kilda out as ill-fated on an epic scale. Does it mean that they’re fundamentally and irredeemably flawed compared to, say, Melbourne? Not really. Melbourne are now great, but some of that greatness was predicated on a time of being so bad.

Does it mean the Saints have screwed up at the draft? Critics point to them passing up on Christian Petracca and Marcus Bontempelli, for instance. But that critique assumes perfect foreknowledge. It’s not the explanation.

Does it mean they’re forever doomed? You might have said the same of the Demons until this year. Their lows were as low as the Saints’, and they had fewer highs. Yet here they are, supreme. Instead of their despair, Melbourne should be St Kilda’s inspiration. It can be done.

So to Warwick and Paul and Donna and Dan and Billy, some of whom are now of an age when they regularly check their super balances, and thousands of others you surely can name who are still to be given the secret code to lifelong contentment, take heart. If even the Demons can be redeemed, so surely can the Saints.

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