Perhaps it isn't the greatest moment to be serving up slices of football history, given the efforts of both North Melbourne and Port Adelaide at the weekend.
In 14 seasons of the revamped final eight, just two of 28 elimination final winners had managed to reach a preliminary final. Now two more have joined the club within 24 hours of each other.
But having dispensed with both Geelong and Fremantle along with those intimidating numbers, the Kangaroos and Power might, ironically, turn to history as their friend this week as they go about the business of upsetting Sydney and Hawthorn.
In the more immediate sense, there's the victories the underdogs managed to record over their respective rivals in their one meeting each earlier this season. But finals history is encouraging, too.
No, their predecessors in the elimination final winners club, Hawthorn in 2001 and Collingwood in 2007, didn't end up reaching a grand final. But they came bloody close.
The Hawks ended up just nine points shy of a heavily-favoured Essendon in 2001. And the Magpies came even closer, just five points short of a Geelong side which would the next week go on to win a premiership by a record 119 points.
Momentum counts for plenty in football. And North and Port certainly have it. Consistency has been the issue for the Roos, but they've now strung together six wins on the trot (two of them finals), as many as any North Melbourne side has managed since the club's last premiership year of 1999.
The Power, meanwhile, is again playing the sort of football that marked its first half of the season, perhaps even better.
Resilience is clearly not an issue. How many sides would have survived the amount of pressure Fremantle applied in the first half at Patersons Stadium on Saturday night? And while a bit more accuracy from Fremantle would have just about shut the gate, the strength with which Port ran out the game was yet another tick for Power fitness man Darren Burgess.
So with this September suddenly turned on its ear, which of the top dogs will be feeling a little more anxious about this week?
I suspect it's Hawthorn, even though there's plenty of "buts" attached to Port's round 10 victory over the Hawks, who that day were stretched as thin as they have been all season, missing Jarryd Roughead, Sam Mitchell, Brian Lake, Josh Gibson and Cyril Rioli.
There's a sizeable "but" factor about North's win over Sydney in round four, too. Roo key defender Scott Thompson was superb on Lance Franklin in that game, holding Buddy to just one behind, but the Swans didn't have Kurt Tippett, Adam Goodes or Sam Reid in the line-up.
Their presence this time creates a different ball game indeed for North, particularly if Lachie Hansen fails to come up again, Roo coach Brad Scott already speculating about the potential inclusion of another tall in Tippett's brother, Joel. And it goes without saying Brent Harvey's potential suspension would be a massive blow against the Swans' huge rollcall of able midfielders.
Port's big hope against the Hawks is to win the midfield clinches, exploit its running game and put the Hawthorn defence under the sort of pressure to which it hasn't been accustomed. There's no obvious reason it can't do that, either, the numbers offering an obvious window of opportunity.
Interestingly, while the Hawks rank third in the AFL for conceding fewest inside 50s, they haven't been so good at denying scores once the ball is inside the defensive zone, with opponents scoring goals from 24.7 per cent of those attacks, for a less-than-impressive ranking of 13th. And Port just happens to rank No.1 for inside 50s.
Its multi-pronged forward set-up will test Hawthorn, the semi-final win a good example. Jay Schulz might have been held to just one goal, but forward/midfielders in Robbie Gray and Chad Wingard and a midfielder in Ollie Wines managed 11 between them.
It was a similar story when Port last beat the Hawks, Schulz held to one major but Wingard and Angus Monfries booting seven. That proliferation of smaller goalkickers stands to keep Hawthorn's third man up, Gibson, more occupied, and have rebounders like Matt Suckling and Grant Birchall defending more and attacking less.
The Hawks get their hands to the football more frequently than any rival, and they're expert at creating uncontested possession with their precise foot skills.
But for all their strong-bodied midfielders such as Jordan Lewis, Brad Sewell, Luke Hodge, Shaun Burgoyne and co., it's Port which actually has marginally superior differential numbers for contested ball. And of that list of Hawthorn absentees from round 10, only Mitchell was missing from the midfield core.
Sometimes, talking up the underdog at this stage of the year can seem more like a case of hoping for a contest rather than about the expectation of one. But Port Adelaide and North Melbourne do seem more likely to offer that than a tired-looking Geelong and a banged-up Fremantle.
Yes, the odds are against the Power and Roos. But maybe that doesn't count for quite as much now as it did only a few days ago.
And while I'm at it...
Since his ascent to the role of AFL chief executive, Gillon McLachlan has repeatedly made a point of the league's determination to re-connect with its supporters.
It's a relationship which has too often been taken for granted, and in 2014 the chickens finally came home to roost in some underwhelming Melbourne attendances, a complex and pricey ticketing structure and poor scheduling the obvious causes.
But while it's still early days, we're yet to see much evidence that the soothing words are going to amount to much serious action, particularly on the scheduling from the 4.45pm timeslot for Saturday's Hawthorn-Port Adelaide preliminary final a prime example.
Nothing irks the hardcore punter more than feeling like those who run the game are trying to put one over them, and frankly, that's how the media release about this week's scheduling came across.
McLachlan said the MCG preliminary final had been scheduled as a twilight game to "maximise both the number of people who could attend the game in person, as well as watch the match on television in SA and around the rest of the country, while ensuring that Port Adelaide could return to their home state on Saturday night".
Let's examine that for a moment. Why, exactly, is a game starting at 4.45pm likely to attract any more people to the MCG than one starting at 2.30pm?
It's a "nothing" slot, neither a bona fide day nor night game, one which certainly conspires against young families who can't afford to make their kids wait until after 8pm to eat dinner, unless they're prepared to shell out a small fortune for overpriced and under-nourishing takeaway food at the ground.
The local football argument some are using clearly doesn't stack up, either. How many local football competitions hosting finals on Saturday are going to be done by the time Hawthorn and Port start?
Of course, once again, it's not about maximising the live audience at all. It's about television, which would ideally have had this game played after 7pm, the one compensation made to any other party a game early enough to allow Port Adelaide to return home the same evening.
The same statement, in a gratuitous pat on the back for its airline partner, said it had "ensured the best outcome for Port Adelaide as the team travelling home from Melbourne next week". Umm, no it didn't. The best outcome would have been a day game, and an arrival home several hours earlier.
You wonder just how many extra thousand TV viewers are going to be watching the game in Adelaide, or anywhere else for that matter, because it's at 4.45 and not 2.30.
And even if that answer was "truckloads", how do you actually measure that not only against the potential loss of more through the gate, but even more cynicism from an already jaded and suspicious football public?
One which would probably have more respect for the AFL in this case if it had just said what everyone already knows to be the case. That the broadcasters pay billions for the rights, the league knows which side its bread is buttered on, and the rest of us are just going to have to cop it.
