Technically, they are still alive.
Last Saturday in Perth, Melbourne Storm conceded the first 14 points to Manly and looked ready to be lowered gently into the 2026 grave.
Then they scored 42.
This week they have the bye and will collect two competition points without having to catch a bomb, defend their right edge or lose another important body part.
Given the way this season has gone, they may be the safest points they have earned.
After that come Penrith, Brisbane and Cronulla. The Storm must probably win all three and hope that several clubs above them wander into September traffic, miss the turn-off and end up at Bunnings.
The remarkable thing is not that Melbourne may miss the finals. Most clubs do it regularly and some appear to find the experience quite restful.
The remarkable thing is that the Storm have made failure look so unnatural.
They have played finals football in every season since 2010, when the salary cap punishment meant they were made to play for no points at all. Fifteen consecutive finals series followed. Children born during that bleak, pointless season are now old enough to drive their parents away from the television.
Melbourne reached the 2024 grand final and lost to the great Penrith block of black granite. A year later they led Brisbane by 10 points at half-time of another grand final and lost 26-22.
Back-to-back grand final defeats should have been a warning. Instead, Round One of 2026 brought a 52-4 annihilation of Parramatta and a 24th consecutive opening-round victory.
Normal service had resumed.
It had not.
Six consecutive losses followed, the first such run of Craig Bellamy’s coaching career. The worst was a 48-6 defeat by South Sydney at AAMI Park, a ground where the Rabbitohs had never previously won.
There was something indecent about seeing Melbourne on the wrong end of that score.
In 2024 the Storm beat the Dolphins 48-6 to secure the minor premiership. It was the sort of score Melbourne used to post when an opponent arrived in Victoria with a few injuries, a nervous halfback and a belief that completing its sets would be enough.
Now the score had returned like a parcel marked NOT AT THIS ADDRESS.
Of course there are reasons. Ryan Papenhuyzen, Nelson Asofa-Solomona, Grant Anderson and Eliesa Katoa left after 2025. Will Warbrick and Xavier Coates have suffered season-ending Achilles injuries. Cameron Munster, Harry Grant, Jahrome Hughes, Jack Howarth and others have spent time unavailable.
A machine can keep operating after a part is removed. It becomes more difficult when someone walks through the factory collecting them.
But injuries alone do not explain the strange collapses, the porous edges and the periods when this famously controlled team appears to have left the instruction manual on the bus.
Against Brisbane in Round Three, Melbourne led 14-0 at half-time before conceding 18 unanswered points. It was a smaller and somehow more irritating re-enactment of the previous year’s grand final.
For years I worried about the Storm becoming too rigid. I imagined a carefree collection of giggling goosesteppers finally dismantling Bellamy’s beloved structure in the game that mattered.
Instead, in 2026, the structure has often dismantled itself.
There is a cruelty in the way a great sporting organisation ages. Gradual decline is not permitted. Opposing supporters who have spent two decades waiting for weakness do not want a dignified farewell. They want to see the champion wobble, then gather around to push.
And fair enough too.
Melbourne’s success has been exhausting for everybody else. The club has supplied salary cap cheating, wrestling controversies, administrative arrogance and an annual procession of obscure players transformed into representative footballers. It has been admired, copied and despised, sometimes by the same person during the same set of six tackles.
But the fall of the Storm feels different because its history is inseparable from one man.
In April the club announced that Bellamy had been diagnosed with a form of neurodegenerative disorder. It also said specialists did not expect the diagnosis to affect his ability to coach in the immediate future and asked that his privacy be respected.
That is all outsiders need to know. Speculation dressed as concern is still speculation.
Last Friday, Bellamy confirmed he will coach in 2027, while admitting that may be the end. A day later his battered side turned 14-0 into 42-20.
Of course it did.
There will be people who think he should have retired after a premiership. The trouble is deciding which one. After 2012? After 2017? After the 2020 triumph achieved while the team was exiled in Queensland? Perhaps after the 2024 minor premiership, although losing the grand final is not the sort of exit Bellamy would have placed in his meticulous folder.
Sport rarely supplies a clean final scene. The champion does not always wave from the summit and disappear behind the mountain. Sometimes he comes back down in the rain with sore knees, a torn jacket and three people asking whether the game has passed him by.
Bellamy has earned the right to leave in his own time.
He has coached Melbourne since 2003. He did not merely build a successful team. He helped make rugby league real in a city that had spent much of its life looking north and pretending the game was taking place in another country.
I wandered into the crumbling concrete of Olympic Park in 1998 as an Australian Rules person curious about a new team. The ground was cold, the view was poor and the game I had dismissed as sluggish and earthbound was suddenly violent, fast and exhilarating.
Bellamy arrived five years later and turned that curiosity into an institution.
That achievement will not be diminished if the Storm finish 11th or 12th this year. In some ways the ordinary season helps reveal how extraordinary the previous 23 have been.
For younger Melbourne supporters, September without the Storm will feel like Christmas without irritating relatives. It may be peaceful but something important will be missing.
For the first time they may have to watch other teams play finals without the familiar comfort, or terror, of wondering how Melbourne will lose the grand final.
I am not sure how I will handle it.
My usual method during important Storm games is to flee the television, walk the streets and later refresh a score on my phone with the bravery of a condemned man opening a pathology result.
If they miss the finals I will finally be able to watch every September match live.
What sort of reward is that?
The 42-20 win over Manly may prove to be nothing more than a final muscular twitch in a season that died months ago. Or it may be the first movement of a team refusing to accept that the men standing around it have already begun discussing the funeral.
Either way, the Melbourne Storm are mortal at last.
Craig Bellamy is not finished yet.
