One the eve of their 2013 campaign, the Brisbane Lions took a moment to remember the Club’s remarkable hat-trick of premierships – achieved a decade ago this year.

To mark the anniversary of the Club’s most recent AFL Grand Final triumph, almost every member of the Lions’ three premierships sides gathered in Brisbane on Thursday for the ‘sold out’ 3-Peat Celebration Luncheon.

Current Lions Co-Captain Jonathan Brown was one of only three members of the Grand Final sides – along with Simon Black and Ash McGrath – to still be playing at the elite level.

Brown was a triple premiership player at just 22 years of age, and can still vividly remember the events that led to the Club’s third straight title.  

“It was a pretty tough year – particularly towards the end of the year, it looked like (a third premiership) wasn’t going to happen,” Brown recalled.

“We’d only won around 14 games during the regular season and we just got hot in the last couple of weeks of the Finals.”

“It was an amazing run actually, and one of the great parties in history I reckon for about the next month after it.”

Unlike the previous two seasons, the Lions did it the hard way in 2003.

With a growing casualty list, the Lions were soundly beaten by Collingwood in the Qualifying Final, before a Semi-Final victory over Adelaide at the Gabba set up a tough road trip to Sydney.

The rest, as they say, is history.  

“We played Sydney in the Preliminary Final and came good in the last quarter,” Brown said.

“Then we blew Collingwood away in the Grand Final under an enormous amount of pressure with all our injuries.”