Port Adelaide coach Ken Hinkley won't spend long sifting through the wreckage of another finals disaster.
Hinkley says he and his stunned players have no other choice but to try and move on quickly after the club's second-biggest AFL finals loss.
"The next 24 hours, we have to live with that performance," Hinkley said after Port's 84-point qualifying final defeat to Geelong on Thursday night.
"We have to live with the facts ... our last three or four finals haven't been at the level we need them to be."
Hinkley is now confronting the prospect of bowing out of the finals with consecutive losses for the second year in a row.
If that happens, questions about his 272-game tenure - the longest in VFL/AFL history without reaching a grand final - will again hit fever pitch despite being contracted until the end of next season.
"It's about our coaching group, it's about our playing group and it's about our footy club," Hinkley said.
"I know, and I get, that it falls back to the head coach in some ways.
"But the reality is, we've always said, this is all of us doing this, this is all of us trying to achieve something together.
"It's not one individual but there's a figurehead and, for me, I sit in that spot.
"I work really hard to give the best results we can possibly get.
"And my team of coaches and my team of people in the footy department do everything they can not to have that result."
The home-turf humiliation ranks behind Port's 119-point capitulation to Geelong in the 2007 grand final as the club's heaviest finals loss.
And it was compounded by dual All Australian and vice-captain Zak Butters being substituted because of a rib injury.
Alarm bells rang for Hinkley when Butters, back-to-back winner of the AFL's most courageous player award, couldn't return.
"He's rated the toughest player in the AFL by his peers and he couldn't go out there again and play ... he must be reasonably sore," Hinkley said.
Butters will have scans on Friday as the Power try to reset for a home semi-final final against the winner of the Western Bulldogs versus Hawthorn elimination final.
"How do we handle it and move forward quickly? Because we have to ... we have got to find a way," Hinkley said.
Asked if there was mental scarring from losing their past four finals, Hinkley replied: "I can appreciate that question because they're the facts and I always deal in the facts.
"The reality is, we believe the group are better than that."
PORT'S LAST FOUR FINALS:
* 84 point loss to Geelong, 2024 qualifying final
* 23 point loss to GWS, 2023 semi-final
* 48 point loss to Brisbane, 2023 qualifying final
* 71 point loss to Western Bulldogs, 2021 preliminary final
