It was around the time the Matildas' team doctor took a stethoscope from her medical kit and crouched down next to Steph Catley, who sat pale and coughing on the sideline in the 27th minute of Wednesday's friendly against Canada, that you wondered exactly how much more of this the players could take before their bodies fell apart.
The 2023 Women's World Cup — the biggest tournament of their lives up to this point — finished just over three months ago, yet none of the senior squad members who helped Australia reach the semifinals have been given much of that time to recover from it.
Catley was one of them. A key player for Arsenal, the defender had just 18 days off before she was thrown back into competitive club football in Europe, alongside team-mate Caitlin Foord.
They both started in a crucial Champions League game against Swedish side Linköping on September 7, which they won, and then played another qualifier two days later against Paris FC, which they lost.
Following those back-to-back games, they then had less than a month to prepare for their league season to resume after the World Cup break. They lost the opening game of that competition, too, and drew the next one five days afterwards.
Roughly two weeks and two league matches later, they were both on a flight to Australia for the Matildas' second-round Olympic qualifiers in Perth, where they played three games in the space of seven days.
Then they were back on a plane to England, starting for Arsenal against Manchester City four days later.
This has been the reality for most of Australia's senior players over the past few months. And while they wouldn't admit it publicly, they — as well as many of the players who reached the final stages of the World Cup — are exhausted.
Head coach Tony Gustavsson said as much before the Matildas' first friendly against Canada earlier this month. Only he used a different word then: "loading".
It's one that the Swede has increasingly used to justify his selection (and non-selection) of players over the past two years, and one that was used as the primary justification for the two vastly different Matildas teams we saw during this December international window.
Some senior players, coming off competitive fixtures in Europe, had only been in Canada a few days by the time the first game was scheduled to kick off.
Recent playing time coupled with international flights coupled with the travel to Starlight Stadium in Langford, British Columbia — an hour on a bus, 2 hours on a ferry, another hour on a bus, all the day before the game — were not ideal circumstances for players whose ever-fatiguing bodies have become both corporate commodities and their own means of employment, with all the extra care that those responsibilities require them to take.
But these are the circumstances, and they will continue to be so as football's various governing bodies introduce more and more games to an increasingly crowded international calendar.
Take Sam Kerr, who missed the December window with a lower leg injury. Between now and the end of January, she will likely play 10 games in three different competitions, including four mid-week Champions League matches squeezed between her league season ones in England.
This is in addition to February's home-and-away Olympic qualifiers against Uzbekistan, requiring her to travel with the Matildas away for the first leg on the 24th before flying to Australia for the second leg on the 28th. Her next game for Chelsea will be played a week later.
All this is to say: no wonder Gustavsson fielded so many young and fringe players against Canada last Saturday, and no wonder the senior side looked flat and uninspired in Vancouver on Wednesday.
This is just one part of the load that the team's core players have been carrying recently, and unsurprisingly one of the biggest factors in Gustavsson choosing to rest almost all of them in their first friendly last weekend.
But beyond the fatigue of their own bodies, there is also the fatigue of their minds. Have the Matildas had a chance to actually sit and process the World Cup that changed their lives — and football in Australia — possibly forever?
Have they been allowed to decompress emotionally and psychologically from an event that they will never experience in the same way ever again?
Have they worked through the highs and lows of their fourth-placed finish, the guilt or disappointment of falling short when it mattered, and the grief that comes with realising that this all-consuming tournament that they've worked towards for years is now behind them?
And what about looking ahead? Do they feel prepared for whatever is the next thing on their horizon: the Olympics, say, or the Asian Cup?
Can they implement a supposedly new system and style of football in the four international windows left between now and then?
And are they confident that the next crop of players coming through, who emerged battered and bruised from that 5-0 thumping to Canada last weekend, can keep up and step in when needed if some of the senior players who got them this far are injured?
How will they go through all of this under the increasingly critical eye of the Australian public, as we saw during and after this latest set of games?
Can they maintain their inspirational connection with their adoring masses if their form on the field takes a tumble? Will the weight of expectation for them to win a medal in Paris — having come so close in Tokyo, where they finished fourth — drive them or drown them?
All the while, speculation swirls around the head coach who's meant to be taking them there. Since the World Cup ended, Gustavsson has been linked with a handful of other international jobs, with the most recent being the Swedish men's national team.
He's been cagey and deflective when asked about it, but who knows when his home federation could make their demands and what he might say once they do?
Who steps in? What system will they want to implement? Which players will they lean on? What rationale will they use?
As women's football continues to boom post-World Cup, with more competitions and corporations poured into its ever-growing economic pool, caught in the middle of its rip-tide are the players themselves: pulling on their jerseys, grimacing through the pain, pushing themselves as far as their aching bodies will let them, winning and losing games along the way.
Australia's two losses to Canada last week may not have been the bang that many of us on the outside expected them to end their remarkable 2023 with.
But the whimper told us something perhaps much more necessary: that these players are carrying heavier loads than what any of us might realise.
The least we can do is allow them to sit on the sideline and catch their breath every once in a while.