With those simple facts in mind, the Power will take the rematch with Geelong at AAMI Stadium for exactly what it's worth - four points in the first game of a long premiership season.
"If we win on Thursday night by 119 points, it doesn't give us the premiership medal," midfielder Kane Cornes said.
"Obviously, it gives us a good start to the season, but it doesn't make up for what happened last year and it never will.
"I would've thought Thursday night was just another round one clash, which is as important as last year's round one clash and will be as important as next year's round one clash.
"It's no more important than round two and we're just looking forward to finally getting out there and playing a real game after having run around the oval for a few months."
The Port Adelaide players met to discuss the Grand Final at the start of the pre-season and, in a similar approach to the Fremantle game of round one last year, the playing group has had the possible Geelong team on the whiteboard for months.
Instead of dwelling on the Grand Final loss over the summer, the Power went to work on improving the "five per cent" of their game that the coaching staff believed let them down last season.
"I think the Grand Final was just a bad day and, to be honest with you, I haven't thought too much about the lessons that I've learned from it," Cornes said.
"I've written it off as a bad day in the great year that we had and this year is another year. Over the summer we've made improvements in our attacking style of footy. We're a very fast side that likes to score heavily.
"We were the second-highest scoring team in the competition last year, so hopefully we can maintain that, kick a lot of goals and play some exciting footy."
Geelong edged out the Power as the highest scoring team in 2007 and Cornes predicted a shoot-out on Thursday night.
"I think you probably go into the game playing that [attacking] style," he said. "If playing attacking footy doesn't work we'll look at changing it up, but certainly that's how we'll start off. Both sides play very attacking and that's why it's going to be so good for watch.
"Playing on a Thursday night is something we've never done before and hopefully we get a big crowd out there and a lot of people watching on TV too."
