MELBOURNE, June 6 -- There was a moment, roughly halfway through the third quarter, when the Western Bulldogs looked like a side that had given up on itself. Down by 29 points, their skills misfiring, their best player going through the motions, they were a team that had brought a knife to a gunfight against a Hawthorn side operating in a different stratosphere of intensity.

What followed was not pretty. There were melees and fines and a quarter-time dust-up that sent television producers scrambling for the replay button. But when the final siren sounded at the MCG on Friday night, the Bulldogs had pulled off one of the more improbable results of the 2026 AFL season, defeating the Hawks 12.5 (77) to 9.17 (71) before a crowd of 59,556.

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