They are four games clear at the top of the AFL ladder and have long had the minor premiership sewn up. Yesterday’s win over the Kangaroos was the club’s 15th in a row. Their injury list is small and their good players are, as they say on TV these days, up and about. They have the Brownlow Medal favourite in Gary Ablett and three of the leading four possession-winners in the league – Jimmy Bartel, Joel Corey and Gary Ablett – controlling their midfield.

Geelong, the reborn, reconditioned Cats from Kardinia Park, is on the march – perhaps towards its first premiership since 1963. The good folk of Geelong, the grommits from the Surf Coast and the farmers from the Western District, who turn up to Shell Stadium with their Drizabones and packed chicken sandwiches, are all licking their lips in anticipation. Could this really be the year?

Yet, and yet … something doesn’t feel quite right. Geelong, the club that has become a byword for heartache, has the burden of history weighing it down as heavily as any lead-filled saddlebags. When it comes to the pointy end of footy seasons, they carry major baggage. Which is why, when you mention grand finals to a Geelong supporter, a look of mild terror crosses their face, as if you’d confronted them with a memory they been trying hard to suppress or taken the scab off a freshly-healed wound.

The bookies have the Cats at $2.20 favourites for the flag, with West Coast at $3.50 and Sydney and Port Adelaide a fair distance behind in third and fourth place.

But if the Cats met any of those three teams – who, incidentally, happen to have won the last three AFL flags – in the grand final, the odds would be closer to 50-50. West Coast, Sydney and Port have proved they can handle the big occasion and all the pressure that goes with it. Geelong – or a previous generation of Geelong players who lost grand finals in 1989, 1992, 1994 and 1995 – have yet to make such a statement. Until they do, the jury will be out, and the doubts will continue to nag away.

Port’s coach Mark Williams was happy yesterday to harp on the choke factor, needling the Cats about their inability to claim the major prize. ”We’ve been there, too, finishing top three years in a row and one year finishing three games clear of everyone else,’’ Williams said. ”But until that big day (the grand final) comes, and those big finals are played, you’re not exactly sure what you are going to deliver.

”There’s a lot of games to go … there will be a lot of questions going through the Geelong people’s heads.’’

Like Hicham El Guerrouj in the Olympic 1500m final in Athens, Jana Novotna in the 1998 Wimbledon singles final, or even Queensland winning the Sheffield Shield after 68 years of trying, Geelong is going to have to do something special to shake its bogey, to banish its demons and finally prove that its not just a pretty frontrunner.

Until the last month or two, mentioning Geelong and AFL premiership in the same sentence was only done by the reckless and the incautious. But Cats fans will not be overly fazed by that: there was a time when it would have been inconceivable for Kevin Rudd and sleazy New York strip joint to be uttered in the same breath either.