Hawthorn coach Alastair Clarkson refuses to concede the club's premiership window has closed, despite being bundled out of the finals in the first week by a fired-up Fremantle on Saturday afternoon.
Regarded by many as a big chance to contend for this year's title, despite finishing seventh on the ladder, the 2008 premiers were knocked off their stride by a hard-running Fremantle that had the answers whenever Hawthorn challenged.
Clarkson, though, remains optimistic about the future, the coach saying the lessons learned during a horror losing streak at the start of the year could now be applied across the whole season in 2011.
"I think we've still got the talent," declared Clarkson when asked if the 2011 flag was a realistic aim.
"We had a terrible start to the season and got ourselves back and going again."
"(But) full credit to Fremantle they made us hit a pretty solid hurdle today but in my view there'd be four or five other sides in the competition that are pretty pleased we've been knocked out."
"The challenge for us is to be more consistent against those top sides."
"From rounds eight through to 22, we were in the top three or four best performed sides in the competition and we had to address some things with how we went about it in the first part of the year."
"The way that we'd structured up and planned to win our 11th premiership at our club, we thought it was going to be pretty similar to the way we won our tenth in terms of game style and the way we moved the footy."
"(But) we found that the games changed so much in the last 18 months to two years that we found we had to do some things differently, so we'll endeavour to do that a little bit better over the course of the summer."
"I think there's some blue sky ahead for us but ... finishing seventh or eighth on the ladder isn't anywhere near where we could have finished."
The Hawks were not helped on the day by Cyril Rioli's second-quarter hamstring injury and they also effectively lost Xavier Ellis for most of the game with an ankle complaint.
But they still never really looked in the contest at Subiaco, as they booted just 1.11 to half-time, their haphazard forward entries allowing the Dockers' defence to clear with ease.
"Unfortunately for us, we've got a couple of key injuries, injuries to our runners and we play our best footy when we have our runners in the side," Clarkson said, referring to Rioli and Ellis, along with Grant Birchall, who injured his hamstring a fortnight ago.
"We won a lot of statistics that we look for in games, we've won the tackles, won the inside 50s."
"Just won the clearances .... won the hard ball gets, contested footy, we won everything except the scoreboard in the end and that's full credit to Fremantle, they played very, very well today."
"But we just didn't have enough polish with the footy and we didn't have enough run and overlap to take advantage of the chances we had with the ball."
"We just picked a bad day to have a pretty ordinary day."
"You know we'll learn from it but unfortunately we've got to wait another five or six months before we get another crack at it."