The social connection that comes from AFL fandom can help demonstrate the value of sport beyond participation
had won a mere four games. Having missed finals the previous year by a single kick deep in the shade of time-on, the Blues were additional proof of history repeating itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.
After the first quarter this sounded like fiction cut from whole cloth. Carlton started in a manner the same as it ever was – sluggish, with long pauses sagging between any play that felt coherently threatening. It hardly seemed worth the bother. My daughter looked at me as if to say “you signed me up for…, I consider myself no stranger to footballing fatigue. This, however, seemed designed to try the patience of the toughest fan.
But as pleasing as a 10-goal win was, there was nothing to suggest it was a portent for a run of moments that have sustained us through to spring – Jesse Motlop putting the Blues five goals up on Collingwood; Paddy Dow putting the crescendo on a comeback against the nemesis, St Kilda; Caleb Marchbank’s left finger saving the game against Melbourne; and Curnow’s mark in the dying seconds on the Gold Coast that guaranteed a September of consequence for the first time in a decade.
On Saturday morning I took her to an open training session at Princes Park, which was to see proof that, in Parkville at least, sport has displaced religion as Marx’s “opiate of the masses” .
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