Melbourne Victory's semi-final win over Adelaide showed us a different kind of football virtue in the A-League Women

Nobody would have blamed Alex Chidiac for giving up, or for — having seen the ball spin away up the field — letting her arms drop by her sides, her aching legs ease to a shuffle.

The game was almost over, after all, and Melbourne Victory were exhausted.

They'd just played half their A-League Women season in the space of a month, and had barely scraped into fourth spot after squeezing a point out of a scrappy 0-0 draw with Canberra on the final day.

It was miraculous, really, that they made it this far at all, let alone to the 92nd minute of Sunday's elimination semi-final with a 2-1 lead against an in-form Adelaide team.

But slow down is not what Chidiac did. Even with her calves burning and sweat stinging her eyes, she watched the ball she'd just cleared from her own penalty area and decided, instead, to sprint after it.

She covered half the field in a few seconds. Adelaide forward Shadeene Evans threw her body in front of the Victory midfielder to try to halt her progress, but Chidiac just shoved her aside and kept going.

Chidiac was at the half-way line by the time Emily Hodgson had set herself to ping the ball back into the box, at which point Chidiac threw her entire body in front of the left-back and deflected the pass back in-field.

Then she got up and did it again, sprinting into Adelaide's defensive half to pressure Emma Stanbury. In the end, it mattered little: Stanbury stepped around Chidiac and sent a hopeful ball forwards, but it also came to nothing.

It probably won't be remembered by many, that stoppage-time sprint. But, in that pocket of time, Chidiac seemed to personify Melbourne Victory's entire season. It has been a season made memorable not by the football they played — which was dishevelled and inconsistent,