Just as both the mentally and physically exhausted Dockers and Swans wandered like zombies around the SCG, or collapsed onto its turf – with each combatant wearing their own, deer-in-the-headlights stares, after the 70-all draw -- I watched live on my iPad, equally befuddled.
I had a hard choice: Mourn Freo’s goal-kicking inaccuracy, celebrate its extraordinarily valiant comeback, or wish Michael Johnson’s dying seconds set-shot traveled five metres more.
A half-hour after the final siren, I chose. But to arrive at and understand my choice, I had to think about both footy and marriage.
You see, I was watching the first-half with a passionate and vocal Swans supporter; someone I dearly love – my wife. She’s also American, but years ago, after I first introduced her to footy, she swooned for the Swannies. A few months before we started dating, I was at the SCG, seeing my first live AFL match and for our first Valentine’s Day together, I got her a personalised, autographed Tony Lockett jumper, which she framed.
As one of my Christmas gifts last year, my wife got me the Freo three-DVD set, "The Best of the Derbys."
In the week leading up to the epic match, she told me I’d be crying by the time the game ended. I told her not to be so sure – the last time a reigning premier underestimated the Dockers, we sent them packing.
The good-natured trash-talk should’ve ended there. But by the opening bounce, my bullheadedness, raised voice – and I admit, superstition – about where in our apartment to watch the game and what device to watch it on created an atmosphere as fierce as a goal-square marking contest.
With no field umpire to command us to calm down, we went to our respective “corners” to watch. With her desktop computer streaming faster than my device, I heard her cheers in the Swans’ dominant second quarter before play unfolded where I watched. I had heard enough and plugged in my ear buds.
But at halftime, peace set in.
She told me then, after 4 am local time, she was going to bed – and invited me to watch with her. She wanted to go to sleep with crowd’s roar and announcers’ commentary. But a few minutes after settling into bed – with my Dockers’ cap and purple jumper still on – a spotty internet connection forced me to go to another room. After planting a kiss on her cheek, I headed into the study to watch the rest.
Like a married couple’s bickering, the two clubs disputed the game. The resolute, battle-hardened Swans were getting their way, but the scrappy, determined Dockers weren’t about to concede. And for the Dockers, just as in some marital spats, things worsened – a 27-point, fourth quarter deficit – before they got better.
But did they ever.
Every time Freo possessed the ball during their unbelievable rally, I rose from my chair. Garrick Ibbotson’s and Nat Fyfe’s posters had me in as much tortured agony as Paul Duffield’s and Johnson’s majors sent me into blissful ecstasy. If only the fickle ball didn’t have a mind of its own.
After the final siren, I tried to make some sense of the result.
If before the season someone told me we’d draw against the Swans at the SCG without Matthew Pavlich, Aaron Sandilands, Stephen Hill, Jonathan Griffin and Kepler Bradley and lose Michael Walters for the last quarter – and be just 6 percentage points outside the top 4, with 14 games left – I’d have been rapt.
When I listened to both the 6PR post-game show and Ross Lyon’s press conference, they spoke as footy experts, but also might as well have been marriage therapists.
The 6PR commentator called the draw for Freo “half a win,” while Lyon said to put the draw “in context.” If only I had thought, a few hours before, about my wife and me each getting “half a win” and putting the dispute “in context,” we could’ve watched the whole game together, as I’d hoped.
I thought about that as I woke her from her dreaming, told her she wouldn’t believe our teams’ result, saying, “we drew.”
She sleepily and contentedly smiled.
We both fell into a deep slumber – at peace, not at impasse.
