The North veteran has seen his share of heavy defeats before and he backed the Kangaroos to regroup during their bye week and hit back hard against Fremantle.
"I think a lot of the older boys have experienced this sort of thing before," Rawlings said.
"One of the greatest strengths of the club is that we're able to fight and come back from losses like this so hopefully the newer generation can take that on board and follow the Brent Harveys and Michael Firritos of this club."
Rawlings admitted the loss was bitterly disappointing given the Roos' big build up to the match, in which they gave themselves every chance to pull off an upset.
"There's a reason why they won the flag last year, but going into the game, we still believed that we could have won today," he said.
"We think we match up like for like pretty well.
"But they won the ball on us a fair bit and when they get their hands on the ball that much, it's always going to be hard. They were able to get inside forward 50 72 times and we were able to go inside 54 times, but we just couldn't convert on the scoreboard.
"If we could have kicked straighter earlier on, we could have been a little bit more in the game, but we'd miss and they'd go down and kick a goal."
Dane Swan and Scott Pendlebury were the chief architects of the Kangaroos' demise, but Rawlings said they had been eager to go head to head with the A-grade onballers rather than go into lockdown mode.
"We wanted to back ourselves in," he said.
"We probably don't get too concerned about other individuals in other teams and hope that our team defence will take care of things, but they obviously got hold of us. We've probably got to have a look at that."
Brady Rawlings is a $384,300 defender in the Toyota AFL Dream Team competition.
