Port Adelaide coach Mark Williams believes his team's final round thumping of North Melbourne, coming off last week's big win over Melbourne will set the Power up for a much improved 2009.
Port crushed premiership contenders North by 76 points with a performance that was bittersweet in the context of an otherwise disappointing year.
"We beat Melbourne by a lot, but everyone discounted that as a credible win so we wanted to march into having a crack at one of the top four sides to see whether what we're working on would hold up, and today it did," Williams said.
"It gives us a lot to think of in the pre-season."
"We feel we'll be much more equipped to beat most sides and to play a couple of different styles that we probably weren't equipped with before."
Asked whether his team went into Saturday's clash conscious of its ability to shape the finals, Williams replied: "We couldn't care less about shaping the finals."
"We were just playing for ourselves … (but) we weren't good enough this year."
Williams said one of his first tasks in the off-season would be to sit down with the AFL's director of umpiring Jeff Gieschen to discuss a free kick count than ran heavily against Port all season.
Williams estimated his players gave away more than 90 frees than they received throughout 2008.
He forecast 'quite a few' list changes and said the club was 'certainly' in the market for Ben Cousins, Daniel Kerr or Alan Didak should they become available.
But Williams played down the prospect of a second stint at Alberton for Freo's Josh Carr who is understood to be keen to return to live in Adelaide.
"He's been a wonderful player for us and went back for family reasons to Perth, but he's 28 now and … I really doubt that he's in our age group to be a viable option," said Williams of Carr.
Williams said it was a 'possibility' that Warren Tredrea would retain the club captaincy and was delighted by news that ruckman Dean Brogan had knocked back offers from rival Melbourne-based clubs to re-sign with Port for a further two years.