It's not often a team is unbeaten after five games and its coach is still publicly pondering whether his charges had anything to worry about, but that was Brisbane's Chris Fagan earlier this season after the Lions had come back from a 39-point deficit to beat the Western Bulldogs in Gather Round.
The question then (after narrow wins also against Geelong and Sydney) was if Brisbane's playing below its best and continuing to win was a reassuring sign of its depth and ability, or a warning sign about complacency.
"We had a lot of conversations over the summer about staying humble," Fagan said then. "I don't think the group's got ahead of itself. It's an early call, we're only five weeks in and there's a lot of football to go, but on what we've seen so far it seems like the hunger is still there."
Nine weeks on, that question is still to be definitively answered. But so fine is the line between AFL success and failure that those narrow wins are instead now becoming narrow losses, and Fagan has a greater conundrum on his hands.
Brisbane is still third on the ladder at 9-4 with one draw. But its record over the last nine games is only 50%, the Lions having won just two of their past six. They've lost three of their last five at their once impenetrable Gabba fortress, struggled to shake off Essendon there, and could only manage a draw with North Melbourne in Hobart.
The glass half-full view is the very realistic proposition that with some decent kicking, the Lions should in fact have won against both Greater Western Sydney on Saturday and Adelaide last week.
Against the Crows, it was 8.15 and eight behinds straight in the final term, blowing several easy chances to put the game to rest. It was 13.18 against the Giants. Turn a handful of those shots to goals and Brisbane would now be sitting on top of the ladder, albeit having played one more game than Collingwood.
"We've lost four games and two of them we've had more shots," Fagan lamented on Saturday. "It's bloody frustrating, but that's life, that's footy and it's just a problem we've got to work our way through."
But to what extent can you work through missed shots? Chronically inaccurate teams over history will inevitably tell you they did pay more attention to goalkicking, they did get better at it on the track. But match day? Different levels of pressure, the presence of crowds? They're not circumstances which can be easily replicated.
"You can't get too preoccupied with it," said Fagan. "There's a lot more things to practise during the week and I know our guys get the right amount of practice. We'll just keep working away on that and not become too psycho about it, because everyone will talk about it."
Yet neither can the Lions become blasé about it, either. Only six teams before this round had been more inaccurate than Brisbane this season. And five of those sat in the bottom six on the ladder. Might be something in that.
Perhaps Brisbane's inaccuracy is a legacy, too, of last year, when the Lions were similarly off target, only Port Adelaide and Richmond less accurate than they, yet still managed to jag that long-awaited premiership. Can they expect to get away with it two years in a row, though?
One certainty for Fagan is that there will be some structural issues now that key defender Jack Payne has been ruled out for the rest of the season with a torn patella tendon.
Against the Giants, Eric Hipwood drew the short straw, but the temporary shift was hardly a raging success, with GWS pair Jesse Hogan and Aaron Cadman booting 11 goals between them.
Darcy Gardiner is the obvious replacement, but Payne's superior form had allowed skipper Harris Andrews to play in a more attacking manner than he probably will be able to now.
Beyond that, however, it's not as though Fagan can pull too many levers or flick switches beyond searching for those little incremental improvements which might make a substantial enough scoreboard difference.
Brisbane was ranked fifth for offence and sixth for defence at the time it got out of jail against the Bulldogs in Adelaide to remain undefeated. The Lions are poorer in attack now, ranked seventh, but have improved their defensive ranking to fourth.
Perhaps the most notable slip is in applied pressure, where the Lions were ranked third after that Bulldogs win, but had fallen to eighth even before Saturday's loss to the Giants, in which they collectively laid just 28 tackles to the Giants' 42, less than half their season average of 56.7.
As you'd expect, Josh Dunkley and Hugh McCluggage assume most of Brisbane's tackling responsibilities. But there's a significant fall-off from that pair to the other Lions' midfielders. Is that one clue the Lions have lost just a little of their harder edge from last year?
Yes, it's barely halfway through the season. And yes, even if Brisbane weren't to secure a top four berth, it did manage a premiership from fifth spot in 2024.
But at some point the deeper a season goes, the greater becomes the danger that a team not playing to its capacity yet getting away with it isn't merely saving itself for more important battles, but more disturbingly, just isn't as good.
You can read more of Rohan Connolly's work at FOOTYOLOGY.