In this chapter, we trace the contradictory forces that inform the ‘cruel optimism’ of gendered success, as women athletes attempt to piece together a ‘good life’ in the changing landscape of women’s professional sport. Women’s hard work, dedication, love of the game, drive, desire to play, pride and loyalty, and the care they show for the development of the game are put to work, commodified and entangled in contracts, pay, conditions and corporate benchmarks of success. Reading across feminist theorizations of affect and critiques of neoliberalism, this chapter explores the material conditions of precarity for women moving into the AFL where positivity and optimism frame the promotion of the women’s game (the AFLW product). Against a long history of exclusion, women’s investment in AFLW is entangled with contemporary post-feminist notions of freedom and autonomy. Through the hauntings of the past and the present, we consider the sticky affects produced through the inaugural season, tracing how the affect economy has produced gendered ways of valuing women and their contribution. We follow the unfolding story of boundary-making practices, through to the ‘life changing’ collective bargaining agreement of 2022. As we map and trace this story, we consider how boundary-making practices work to produce relations of expansion and contraction. Finally, we consider the affects of the ‘landmark’ joint collective bargaining agreement, and how numbers are used to both tell a story of success, at the same time as hauntings from the inaugural season continue to circulate.