Melbourne ran on to the MCG to a pyrotechnics show, lashings of Bon Scott and a cacophony of boos. It was notionally Melbourne’s home game, but it was Carlton’s crowd. The Demons were the higher ranked team and had the songs after goals, but the Blues were the ones riding the wave and had the game’s tune.

For the first hour however, it seemed as though the brand of football Blues coach Josh Fraser has cultivated may not hold up in a knockout game. When Melbourne moved the ball, they moved it with purpose, with precision and with speed. Carlton’s ball movement was more laboured and slipshod. Their entries into the forward 50 were as shallow as the boundary umpires’ throw-ins. Blues captain Patrick Cripps was forced to ruck at times, which was like watching Daniel Day-Lewis bob up in an episode of Hey Dad. Most of their early goals came through sheer will. The Blues bludgeoned their way to parity, but the Demons still looked the superior team.

The game opened up in the second half, and Carlton began to work their way through Melbourne’s grid. They shifted the ball around, identified gaps, utilised every inch of the MCG, and finally began to hit their targets. Attempts at such crisp kicking during Michael Voss’s tenure usually ended in calamity. It certainly did the last time the two sides met in late March. That afternoon, the Blues coughed up a 43-point lead. They began that game zigzagging the ball like a peak Brisbane side. They finished it as a shell of a team, barely capable of hitting a target from 10 metres away. Voss was never coming back from that second half.

On Saturday night, the Blues’ ball movement allowed them to circumnavigate Demons ruck Max Gawn, a solid but frustrated figure all night. Nothing encapsulated the improvement in this facet of their game more than a passage of play halfway through the third quarter. It began with Blues youngster Cooper Lord retrieving a loose ball and caressing it around his body, continued with a perfectly weighted pass from Ollie Hollands and finished with Ben Ainsworth putting their side to within a point of the Demons. There were nine players in the chain, and every possession saw them navigate a high degree of difficulty, work their angles, and keep their heads.

Melbourne coach Steven King’s side had averaged nearly 18 goals a game at the MCG this season, making a mockery of some of the best defensively inclined coaches in the game. Carlton kept them to 55 points, and just three goals after quarter time. The suspension of key forward Jacob van Rooyen cost Melbourne dearly. But their low score was more reflective of how resolute and organised Carlton’s defence was, and how ferociously they tackled. Four tackles in particular – Frankie Evans on Caleb Windsor, Hollands on Trent Rivers, Lachie Cowan mowing down Bayley Fritsch, and Sam Walsh brick-walling Tom McDonald set the tone for the Blues’ comeback.

But it was their young players who helped secure this wildcard final victory. First-year defender Harry Dean outstretched Gawn in the opening minutes of the game, took a contested mark of the utmost importance in the dying moments of the contest, and spent the rest of the game blunting Melbourne’s forays and hurling himself at packs. Carlton have not taken a key defender so high in the draft since No 1 pick Jacob Weitering more than a decade ago and both of them were superb.

And then there was Jagga Smith. It is hard to overestimate the effect his ACL injury had on Carlton’s fortunes last year. Yes, he hadn’t yet played a game after being drafted with pick No 3 in 2024, but the injury zapped all of the optimism out of their pre-season. On Saturday night, he didn’t fumble, didn’t deviate, didn’t get overawed and didn’t lose his head when Melbourne targeted him. Smith looks like a footballer born for that stage. He and Walsh had nearly 70 possessions between them. Together with Dean, and along with a few more speculative picks that former list manager Nick Austin deserves enormous credit for, the club looks well stocked for years to come.

This game was played under a full moon and for Melbourne, it was a bad moon rising. They played some of the most exhilarating football of 2026. But the van Rooyen suspension, the absence of key defender Jake Lever through injury and the loss to the Bulldogs last week sucked the air out of their season. For months, Melbourne games at the MCG were jolly romps. But knockout games are knife fights, not funfairs. To go from eyeing off the double chance just a few weeks ago to losing to the 10th placed team will be a bitter pill to swallow.

The AFL really is hit on the arse by a rainbow sometimes. The Blues are the very definition of a wildcard. In 2013, they became the first team to qualify for finals from ninth. They’ve now become the first team to qualify from 10th. That 2013 final ended up being one of the most memorable Carlton wins in decades. This Friday they play a Geelong team they’ve matched up well on in recent times, even when things were at their most dire.

When Carlton beat Melbourne in the semi-final three years ago, Voss looked up at the mayhem in the stands and wondered if any moment in his career could surpass it, even the three flags as a player. He was so wired that he didn’t sleep that night. Fraser cut a far more imperturbable figure after the wildcard win. Voss always looked like a prize-fighter in moments like that. Fraser looks like an undercover tram ticket inspector. But he’s steering one of the wildest rides a football team has ever had.