The invention or imposition of a team. A plastic construct to be dropped into a long-established world governed by emotion and ritual. And once there asked to compete with the imperative to urgently prosper.

Expansion is fraught.

That’s true the world over. Franchises open to froth and bubble but close as desolate failure. The lucky are relocated or revamped.

Neither the certainty of demographics nor the intangible of passion guarantee even the most logical success.

Among the fossils of the NRL are the Rams, Chargers, Mariners, Crushers, Bears and Reds. The NBL has more extinct species than surviving. And having spread in haste the A-League is winding back its extravagances.

Next summer cricket will drop an entirely made up competition on the sports fans of Australia and ask that it be taken immediately to heart, that we should barrack as if the generations have handed these silly teams down.

Against these realities the AFL had made expansion look easy.

Chairman Mike Fitzpatrick decreed the competition had stood still too long. He gave an unequivocal timeline to a newspaper and demanded the executive make it so.

The League harnessed its ample intellect and financial muscle to convince the existing clubs, establish an infrastructure, ground the new team in local support and write a set of rules. And it was so.

The Suns was created. And most saw that it was good.

Gold Coast was welcomed to much fanfare at the Official Season Launch. The excitement of the AFL’s first new club since 1997 would be the defining characteristic of the year.

Such was the goodwill it mutated into optimism and the community forgot how hard expansion is. An unprecedented football experiment was alive and it was Frankenstein we were told.

Until the team played.

Suddenly all those prized draft picks along with the best player in the competition and a couple of worthy sidekicks were given some perspective.

Those predictions of Premierships in year three and the assumption of five flags over a decade had a little context.

Emma Quayle - the football writer who has made the study of list development her special subject - wrote in The Age of Gold Coast’s 119-point losing defeat: “Does what happened really mean anything, or hold any genuine consequences? Not at all.”

She is right. To a point.

What one game did was jolt reality back into a discussion that had spiralled into the realms of the ludicrous.

We gloat about this being the toughest competition in the country, rivalling any domestic league in the world. Yet we were being asked to believe an upstart, a start-up, would swan in and dominate it before it reached adolescence.

In the past expansion teams were full of footballers. Some mediocre. Some washed-up. Some self-content. But they were of the competition. They were hardened to it and its demands.

The Suns are not that. They are trainees.

Every season the competition has its “worst” team. Some are dire. Some are incompetent. Some apparently are deliberately bad.

The Suns are not that. They won’t be competitive. They can’t be competitive.

They have entered a competition that is rocket-fuelled. It is brutal on even its most seasoned competitors. It will be merciless.

Ask yourself this: How will the Suns actually win a game? I imagine they will, but how?

If there’s a fear it’s that the precious gems might be damaged in either development or education, stunting the guaranteed growth of the future.

The model at developing clubs at present is four years of gathering players, followed by two of indoctrinating them in the ways of the game. Year seven is when the push becomes realistic.

The Suns will still be gathering players by cashing in those compensation picks in 2013 not winning the flag.

None of this is a knock. In fact the knocks this week have been unfair.

It is reality. Expansion is hard. It will be for the Suns. It will be doubly so for the Giants.

Gerard Whateley leads the Grandstand AFL team on ABC Radio. The views expressed are his own and not necessarily represent the views of the club.