While Geelong is resisting the notion that its castle has collapsed, at the least it is time for a renovation. If Gary Ablett is lost to the club, something more substantial might be in order. Imagine the battering Collingwood would have inflicted last Friday had Ablett not been there.

The mighty have slipped, if not fallen. A number of great players are in unmistakeable decline and the current group clearly won't win Geelong's next premiership. Like it or not, it's time to assess an era: the rise, the achievements, the rare failures, and the eventual overthrow of a remarkable football dynasty.

From May 6, 2007, the day the Cats kicked 35.12.222 to beat Richmond by 157 points, they won 81 of 95 games. Nothing in history betters that. Both "The Machine", Collingwood's legendary four-flag team of the late 1920s, and Norm Smith's 1950s Melbourne champions, recorded just below 80 wins across their best 95 game sequence. Modern Geelong dominated week-in week-out, over four seasons, like no other team.

The Cats did it with such class and flair that we can't but assess this as a glorious chapter in the game's history. It's unlikely that the combination of skill and grace they've recently brought to the arena will be seen again in a long time. We've been privileged to bear witness.

But the question has to be asked: was two flags a good enough result? Should a team that won so many games have won more premierships? While there is more than one way of assessing football achievement, the harsh reality is that premierships are the gold standard.

Brisbane won three in a row from 2001-2003, Hawthorn bagged three in four years from 1986 to '89, and Carlton three in four years from 1979 to '82. On that measure, far from being the best in history, the Cats are no better than fourth-best of the last 30 years. This is in stark contrast to their winning consistency rating.

How do we read these contrasting measures of the Geelong era? Were the Cats unlucky not to do better in those four September campaigns, or was there something about them, and their method, that delivered a lesser result than their overall win-rate might have predicted?

It's hard to sustain an argument that the Cats were in any way unlucky. The single game they would like to have over again was the 2008 grand final. In theory, had they won that they would have their three flags and parity with all but McHale's Machine. But not only didn't they win it, they lost it by a substantial margin. They were in it for almost three quarters, on a hot day against an injury-depleted team, yet when it had to be won Hawthorn outstripped them.

I've never bought the theory that this was some kind of fluke. And, anyway, even if Geelong had won that day, I genuinely wonder if they would have held St Kilda at bay the following year. Mark Thompson said the day before the 2009 grand final that when the going got tough, his players would remember the hurt of the previous year. Without it, they may well have succumbed to the Saints and still had just two flags.

Anyway, these are all ifs, buts, and maybes. The Cats went perilously close to losing their 2007 preliminary final against Collingwood. They won the 2009 grand final by the skin of their teeth. In contrast, their defeats in the 2008 and 2010 finals were comprehensive. Geelong collected two flags from four years of dominance and history suggests it is a slightly skinny reward.

Sad to say, perhaps their style of game left them vulnerable. They thrilled with their corridor-football, but it did involve risk. And they compensated for a shortage of go-to forwards by developing a bamboozling high-possession game that almost always released someone to kick a goal.

Alas, on the biggest of occasions it wasn't totally reliable. Of their last seven finals over three seasons, beginning with that fateful 2008 match against the Hawks, Geelong won four and lost three. They did play the game as it should be played, but it didn't always provide the optimum result.