Watch Alastair Clarkson post-match press conference above.

ALASTAIR Clarkson has urged Hawthorn's players to overcome the heartbreak of Saturday's 10-point Grand Final loss to the Sydney Swans and regroup for another tilt at the premiership next season.

The Hawks coach was gentler on his players than he was after last year's three-point preliminary final loss to Collingwood, when he said they weren't "hard enough or tough enough for long enough".

Instead, Clarkson paid tribute to the Swans, and pointed to the coaching career of the great Allan Jeans as inspiration for the Hawks.

Jeans led St Kilda to three Grand Finals between 1965 and 1971, winning one, and then Hawthorn to six Grand Finals between 1983 and 1989 (with a year off in 1988 due to illness), winning three and losing three.

"It's a little bit raw at the moment," Clarkson said.

"We played a very, very good football side today, and when you front up for Grand Finals, it's always going to be an epic battle.

"We played against a football side that is very, very talented, and we knew it as a footy club, but they just played it perfectly by sitting under the radar.

"We're disappointed that we didn't get the result.

"[But] when you come to the big dance at the end of September, you're not going to win them all the time.

"Allan Jeans came here on nine occasions and won four.

"So we just need to keep turning up.

"Along the way there is going to be some heartbreak, whether that's in prelims or whether that's in Grand Finals.

"But along the way there'll also be some joy.

"We didn't get that today, but we're hopeful that if we learn from our season, we'll get another chance to have another crack at it in the not-too-distant future."

The coach was reluctant to point to specific moments as reasons for the loss, but conceded missed opportunities at important times had been costly.

Hawthorn had 18 more inside 50s and five more scoring shots, but finished behind where it mattered most.

"You can go through 120 minutes of footy, and every player and every coach is going to find something they thought they could have done better," Clarkson said.

"You add all those things up, and you lose the game of footy.

"They just had a little bit more polish when they went forward than what we did.

"We had a lot of opportunities and we just couldn't finish, and our inside 50 entries weren't polished enough to give us a chance."

Clarkson said the strong wind to the city end was a factor in the remarkable turnaround from the first quarter to the second.

The Hawks dominated play in the opening stanza, kicking 4.5 to 1.4, before the Swans fought back with six unanswered goals leading into half-time.

Clarkson then credited his players with fighting back to hit the front after the Swans stretched the lead to 28 points early in the third quarter.

"It was a great effort by our guys to get themselves right back into the game by three-quarter time," he said.

"We won some of the stats in the midfield that we're searching for in terms of contested ball and clearances, and with the way we play our footy, that usually converts into a victory for us.

"It didn't on this occasion, but you've just got to keep turning up.

"They're big games, they're hard to win, and we didn't get it today, but it's not going to stop us from going damn hard across the summer and trying to go again."

Clarkson said he was confident the Hawks were entering "a really good era".