Hawks coach Brian Goorjian admits coffee might have been a questionable choice when he sat down to watch his team on television for the first time ever on Sunday.
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The mastercoach rarely needs any kind of pick-me-up but, battling COVID fatigue on a rainy afternoon, he went for a caffienated beverage.
It wasn't the diet coke he used famously guzzle down courtside in his earlier coaching days, but it was still too much for wife Amanda.
"I'm sitting in the living room and my wife says 'you're not going to be emotional watching the game are you?' I said 'no, no'," Goorjian recalled on Wednesday.
"Then the tip came and (Sam) Froling goes to lay the thing in and misses it... she says 'that's it, I'm out of here'.
"I called her with about two minutes to go and said 'we're up 25, it's over'. She came upstairs and said she could hear me on the street."
His players could well have heard him in Melbourne had they lost to United. Instead, they managed a demolition job on the defending champions, though it did little to calm their absent coach.
"I honestly had a mindset of sitting down, pouring a cup of coffee and watching, but I could not do it," he said.
"I was thinking about my career in domestic basketball and I can't recall ever missing a game and I found it extremely difficult. I was walking up and down the hallway, smashing my fists down.
"Playing them on their court, you just don't know which way it was going to swing. Obviously halfway through I thought 'we're a chance here' and then you get more emotional.
"The bottom line is Jake (Jackomas) did a terrific job running the team and the guys really stepped up. That transtion game is key, it loosens up our offense.
"That's easy to say, but Melbourne's a very hard team to do it against so it was a really important big win for us."
From looking dead and buried a matter of weeks ago, the Hawks could finish round 18 on top of the ladder should results concievably fall their way this weekend.
For Goorjian, there's no secret to the turnaround.
"The guys did such a good job, and have done over the last month, on defence and trying to rebound the ball better," he said.
"I think last year the guys understood [sooner] what we had to do to win. If we didn't guard, we were just limited.
"This year we have so many more scoring options, it's been harder to convince the group on the other side of the ball. You can't win in this league without defending and rebounding, that's what our league is.
"We've been near the bottom and it almost cost us our season. We've got a long way to go, our schedule down the back stretch is brutal, but the light's switched on and we've been getting better and better there."
Two games against an out-of-contention Bullets team, the first on Thursday in Wollongong, shape as the banana peel fixtures on the run home that otherwise features top-four fancies.
Goorjian says the Bullets with a free swing present a different challenge.
"We haven't had that challenge yet and it's somthing we've talked about," Goorjian said.
"[Brisbane] has nothing to lose and our mentality can't be different to how it was going into Melbourne. With the addition of me not being there, everybody lifted.
"If there's a letdown we'll pay the price. That's another test in this thing, that no games are any different and you have to have the same mindset."
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Mitch Jennings
Sports writer. Sport is my passion, rugby league my first love.
Sports writer. Sport is my passion, rugby league my first love.
