Some seasons fall apart in the last twenty minutes. Hunter's fell apart on the physio's table, and it started before the bunting came down.

Round 1 at No.2 Sportsground: Titi Nofoagatatoa helps himself to a hat-trick on debut, the Wildfires nick it 35-34 against Manly, and Newcastle goes home thrilled. Then you read the casualty list. They'd walked in already missing Bradford, Kauika-Petersen, Phil Talaileva and Meafua. They limped out minus Porch, Noa and Annan. Seven first-graders in the rehab group before round two - a roster decimated in the proper Roman sense, and they hadn't finished the first course.

Then it got silly. By Round 6, John Porch was the fifth man in six rounds to wear the No. 10. Winchester's wrist, Evenden's neck, Annan shipped back to the Force, and Logan Love - a halfback - covering at ten until his knee went too. Rome managed four emperors in all of 69 AD and historians still haven't stopped talking about it. And Hunter weren't done: Cullen Gray got his turn through the back half to make it six, before Winchester, of all people, dragged himself back from that opening-round wrist to close out the year in the jersey. Full circle, with a casualty ward in between.

A finals side, then the floor went

Which is what bites. Twelve months earlier this mob played finals footy and spent a stretch of 2025 top of the entire competition. Not battlers scrapping for respectability - a good side coming apart in public.

For ten rounds they hid it beautifully. Five wins from the first ten, Manly done by a point, Souths twice by three. Newcastle was doing sums about September. Peak delulu, in hindsight. Because Round 11 arrived and someone turned the gas off: eight straight losses to finish, not another win after the second weekend of June. Wildfires, and they ran clean out of oxygen.

The four-point season

Here's what'll be gnawing at Darren Coleman all summer. Hunter lost four matches by three points or fewer - Eastwood by two, the Two Blues by two, Norths by three, then the Two Blues again by a single solitary point in the final round. Warringah by five on top. Nudge a handful of moments and we're discussing a finals run.

Round 9 at Mosman is the season in eighty minutes. Locked up late, TJ Talaileva takes Seb Cameron out in the corner in a manner the laws take a very dim view of, ten in the bin, penalty try, scores level, Norths roll the maul and kick the winner. Gone by three. Greg Norman had a more relaxing Sunday at Augusta.

They also served up the freak scoreline of the year at Chatswood: 54 points, and beaten. Sixty-six to 54, eighteen tries, a video-game afternoon. Coleman said he'd never been part of anything like it. Quite right too - declaring on 500 and still following on is not something that happens to well-run outfits.

Doing a Harold Holt

Now the number that explains those eight losses better than any highlights package.

Hunter held 52 per cent of possession and 53 per cent of territory across the season. Both above the competition average. Both among the best in the grade. They had the footy, they had the paddock, and they still conceded the second-most points in the competition. Water, water, every where - nor any drop to drink.

Because in the 40-to-60 minute window they managed 67 points for the entire season. Fifteen per cent of their total, the lowest third-quarter share of any club in the competition, and the skinniest raw figure too. Ten tries in that window, also the fewest going round. Whatever was said in the sheds at half time, the boys left it in there with the orange peel. Forty minutes of genuine menace, then twenty where the Wildfires did a Harold Holt. Missing, presumed drowned.

The ones that kept fronting

In amongst the rubble, some seriously good footy.

Logan Love finished third in the entire Shute Shield for goalkicking at 82.7 per cent, and fifth for points with 126. Run down that list and it's outside halves and specialist kickers the whole way; Love is a scrum half who spent part of the year at ten because the cupboard was bare. Wallace Hartley stuff - the band leader still playing in perfect time while the deck tilts.

Jack Barr came fourth in the competition for turnovers won with 24, jackaling away all season without a soul outside Newcastle making a fuss.

And Brendan Palmer, the local pocket rocket, finished fourth for defenders beaten with 55. His numbers tell a properly sad little story: eight tries by Round 11, then essentially nothing - while his defenders-beaten climbed from 40 to 55 across those final eight rounds. He never stopped breaking the line. The blokes outside him stopped turning it into anything. Tantalus in a headband, the fruit forever an inch past the fingertips.

Make do and mend

John Porch gets his own section, because what a year he had.

The man's a 2016 Olympian. Four years with the Aussie Sevens, then seven seasons up north with Connacht in Ireland and Vannes in France. A Tamworth boy home in Newcastle for the next chapter, presumably picturing a few cruisy Saturdays and a cold one after.

What he got was a head cut in Round 1 and a season being handed whichever jersey currently had a hole in it. Fullback. Captain. Goalkicker. Then fly-half, because there was nobody left standing. He drilled the winner from 40 out against Souths in Round 3. You don't ring Red Adair because things are ticking along nicely; you ring him because the well's on fire, and at a club called the Wildfires that's just about perfect.

By Round 6 the fire had the upper hand. Away to an unbeaten Easts at Woollahra, Hunter managed a single try all afternoon - a Porch cross-field kick plucked out of the air by Palmer - and went down 36-10. Mr Fix-it was out of things to fix.

Where to from here

The heartening part is that Hunter aren't guessing, and the right bloke is asking the questions.

Darren Coleman has been at this professionally for 27 years - former Waratahs Super Rugby head coach, and he's run both the Waratahs and Brumbies academies. In July he launched a program to find and build the region's next professional, likely out of Newcastle University where the Wildfires already train. His thinking is blunt and correct: elite players need more than club rugby. An agoge on the Hunter, essentially - catch them young, make them hard, send them up.

People forget, Hunter went from being one of the worst in the comp to making finals in no amount of time. It doesn’t matter what sport you play or in which comp, that is a feat rarely acheived.

And he has the clay. TJ Talaileva spent most of this season as an 19-year-old No. 8 and was among their best, following brother Phil into the engine room. Palmer is a local Coleman has openly tipped to go pro. Nofoagatatoa introduced himself with a debut hat-trick. There's a proper Hunter side buried in this wreckage.

What they need is one year where they can name the same fifteen twice. Settle that No. 10 jersey on one set of shoulders, find something worth saying at half time, and the four-point losses start landing the other way up.

This was never a bad team. It was a team handed a different set of players every Saturday and asked to make it sing. Coupled with a ghastly drive every weekend, eighteen rounds of that would drain most.