For the Adelaide Crows, the AFL season was a matter of 'what could have been'

In the surreal moments that follow an AFL team's unexpected exit from a finals series, the glare from the ground's floodlights ceases to illuminate and instead takes on the glow of an interrogation room.

There is not only a sense of shock but a foreboding of aftershock, and the vanquished players, with nowhere to hide, find themselves suspended between two fates — the one that has just befallen them, and the public fallout that has hardly begun.

At Adelaide Oval on Friday night, the Crows trudged with the gait of the damned as they departed the scene of their 34-point defeat at the hands of Hawthorn.

Half an hour later, as Crows coach Matthew Nicks fronted the cameras and faced the music at his obligatory post-match media conference, he mulled over his side's September slump.

"We walk