DID the Kookaburras spend so much time looking back they forgot to look properly forward?

Did they spend so much time addressing the demons of the past that they actually brought them back to life?

Or did they simply fall to that dreaded condition called the Olympic Shock Syndrome, where the stresses of the greatest sporting tournament on earth acts as a numbing tranquilliser to skills which suddenly melt in the heat of the moment.

Whatever the reason, the Kookaburras failure at this hockey tournament, including Monday’s quarterfinal loss to the Netherlands, will remain one of Australia’s most inexplicable Olympic collapses ever.

The curse of the Kookaburras has struck again.

The team who can beat anyone between Olympic years are stuck on just one gold medal, in 2004.

The most horrified people of all, apart from the players, would have been the three psychologists the team hired to work with them after they mentally collapsed in the semi-final against Germany at the London Olympics four years ago.

Not just worked with them but stripped them mentally naked before each other, got them to tell each other about festering home truths, pulled them apart and rebuilt them only for them to collapse far more spectacularly than they did last time.

That process took more than a year and it begs the question ... what on earth could they do to address this loss? How many times can you renovate a house?

The Kookaburras, so aggressive in non-Olympic years, just played timid, constipated hockey. They looked disconnected to each other.

A team famed for their precise skills and derring do lacked trust in each other which was surprising because when the psychologists were hired after London that was the first crack they discovered and subsequently addressed — a lack of trust under pressure.

This campaign was supposed to be about trusting the man beside you.

Among the hockey fraternity there were plenty of opinions of what went wrong such as carrying too many injured players and selecting players who are flash but flaky rather than big-occasion specialists with hardy temperaments.

No Olympic loss is painless but you sense this one will scar players for many years.

The last thing captain Mark Knowles said to his players when they assembled after the squad was announced was “this has been the result of more than three years of hard effort ... you deserved it.’’

It just doesn’t seem right that Australian hockey’s greatest player, Jamie Dwyer, could leave the game with such a whimper.

And a scar he will never forget.