Timothy Boyle is a sports columnist with The Sunday Age
Nick Riewoldt's first game for St Kilda was Malcolm Blight's last as coach. Before that intersecting match, Blight gathered the team on a clear day at training and pointed up at a midday moon. "Boys," he said, "People have walked on that."
This year's draftees are entering a new world of social morality that scarcely existed when its retirees made their debuts in the early 2000s.
Sam Mitchell says most footballers that go deep into a career care about game numbers 200, and 300, and not necessarily about the ones in between. His close friend Jarryd Roughead on Sunday is passing 250 AFL games, like a train passing a mile marker on its way to a grand view.
If Mason Cox does not sign a contract before October 31 he'll be deported, and resume his American life a different man. The last three years of Cox's extraordinary story will become another traveller's document, for which he'll find no understanding audience in Texas beyond his family.
Scott Pendlebury plays his 250th AFL match on Sunday. He's made something awfully difficult look easy, to an extent no other player has managed.
Like a lot of people forged in football, Nathan Buckley refers to his life as being inside "the footy world". It's an acknowledgment that another world exists, where winning and losing is not the only metric of a man.
Heath Shaw, known to friends as "Heater", is a natural born rogue. By Shaw's own account he's matured, but he managed to invite fresh controversy this year after he was overheard on television calling his opponent a "retard".
Sport. It's not all about the dough. Pizza, that's another story. Sunday Age writer Timothy Boyle played for Hawthorn with Sam Mitchell. Here, in the first in a regular series of interviews they team up again to make pizza and talk football, strengths, limitations and comedy.
Sentimental favourites overcome a perennial hard luck story: AFL media columnist of the year Tim Boyle's analysis.
Sportspeople are either interesting in their prime because they are at their athletic best, or in their twilight because they've managed to last until circumstance and history rise around them and create a story.
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