accessing oldest reflog entry with ref@{N}?

Hi,

after a couple of months of inactivity I recently updated my git clone from the main repo, and later ran 'git gc', which, of course, dutifully pruned the old reflog entries, leaving my reflogs quite shallow:

$ git reflog master 0dbd8125 master@{0}: merge origin/master: Fast-forward f3828dc0

Then later I had to access the previous state, which I usually do with master@{1}, but not this time:

$ git log --oneline -1 master@{1} fatal: Log for 'master' only has 1 entries.

Annoyed, I just copy-pasted the sha and got the job done.

However, I wonder why it didn't worked. 'git reflog' didn't print master@{1} or any message for the oldest entry, but I can live without that. The sha is undoubtedly there, however, so git should know where master@{1} points and should "Just Work", shouldn't it?

Thanks, Gábor