CARLTON coach Brett Ratten believes the experience of his club's first finals appearance since 2001 will prove a major positive for many of his players.

The Blues had built a 30-point lead early in the fourth quarter of Saturday night's elimination final but were overrun by the Brisbane Lions, who won by seven points and booked a semi-final against the Western Bulldogs.

Ratten said that while the side was devastated, it would learn from it.

"The experience to play and to have the emotion of a final I think is really important for our group to take that in," he said.

"[There's also] the experience of losing and how bitter it feels.

"There are a lot of positives when you think of a ruck combination of (Matthew) Kreuzer and (Shaun) Hampson, (Marc) Murphy and (Chris) Judd are still babies and we expect them to be the cream of the competition in a lot of areas."

Carlton had survived final-quarter surges to beat the Lions twice this year, but couldn't weather one this time.

"That surge mentality that they've done before – we've faced it a couple of times and we've hung on [but] they got us this time," Ratten said.

"They just kept surging forward, hitting forward, knocking forward and just scrambling the ball and they just won a lot of one-on-ones towards the back end.

"We squandered a little bit of the footy going inside 50 when we couldn't hit blokes."

Ratten said Daniel Bradshaw was the difference between the two sides, booting five goals including the last two of the match.

But he added full-forward Brendan Fevola was without peer.

"I thought his game tonight regardless of three goals, his chasing effort is probably the best I've ever seen of any power forward of the competition," Ratten said.

"He was probably best on ground I think because what he tried to do for his team was unbelievable."

Ratten said injuries to some key defenders proved hard to cover, particularly with Jonathan Brown (4.3) and Bradshaw (5.3) running rampant against Bret Thornton and Paul Bower.

He highlighted that the hole left by Jarrad Waite, Michael Jamison and Mark Austin was too big to fill.

"For Paul Bower to play sometimes deep down in defence makes it pretty tough for him so we just had a few of the boys that we would like to play that couldn't come up," Ratten said.

After the game, Ratten spoke with his players about whether they had settled for just making the finals or if they had focused on progressing as far as they could in September.

He said their ambitions needed to be even greater next season.

"We missed an opportunity," Ratten said.

"As a football club we've sort of been screaming out to get these opportunities, back into the finals, but we let this one go."