This short story was initially published in draft form on The Footy Almanac. It eventually served as the basis for the final chapter of the third edition of Tortured Tales of a Collingwood Tragic.

When I first fell in love with Zoe, I told her “you are like sunshine to me.” It was an impulsive outburst but I meant it. She seemed to bring light into all the areas of my life that had become darkness. I also told her “you are the love of my life” and I meant that too. Except later I realised it might not be true. There was another longer, deeper love that happened before her, or my first wife or even my first kiss. Collingwood. That cruel but irresistible mistress that takes you on the giddiest of highs but also the most crushing, devastating of lows.

I first encountered Zoe as a student teacher. She was locked in conversation with a colleague in the office I shared and, as fate would have it, I was her soon-to-be supervisor. She was young, blonde, intelligent and very American. She had a face like Jennifer Lawrence and eyes like Julia Stiles and a kind of nerdy optimism that just seemed wonderful. As she was a foreigner in Melbourne, my colleague of course soon asked her, “Do you have a football team?” Zoe replied, “I haven’t decided on one yet but I’ve just been told not to follow Collingwood because they are the team for toothless drug addicts.” I suddenly choked on my after lunch Mento. I had written a whole book just to deal with this appalling attitude. My classic 2011 text Tortured Tales of a Collingwood Tragic. I reached for the shelf above and extracted a copy, stood facing her and with a dramatic flourish handed her the book. Upon seeing the title, author and picture of me on the front cover, her face turned deathly pale as she realised her forthcoming supervisor and mentor teacher, responsible for her grading, was himself one of these “toothless drug addicts.” I hoped that she would come to learn the error of her ways. To avoid being drawn in to such tiresome stereotypes. I mean, yes… okay, there are SOME Collingwood fans around the boundary on game day that Channel 7 like to capture, who do look kind of like Roald Dahl cartoons or early drawings of the Missing Link. But this is not offering a genuine cross section. IT’S NOT A GENUINE CROSS SECTION!

Somehow we recovered from this incident to become close friends throughout the course of her teaching round and I chose magnanimously not to mark her down for this thoughtless prejudice. And we talked, on and on. Not about sport or footy because she thought both were pointless but books, films, history, science, mythology and nostalgia. It turned out to be quite the meeting of the minds.

Zoe got a job at my school so that we could continue to talk and then eventually one day we started ‘dating’ as the Americans like to say. She proceeded to see football as pointless and would patronise me whenever I got excited about Collingwood winning a close game by saying “I’m glad the sports are going sportingly” with the air of an indulgent parent feigning interest in a child’s play activity. (Another nail biting last-second win from a Jamie Elliot goal. That’s so great! Off you go to the sand pit.) I tried to explain what it was all about, how she should show an interest. That it was socially and culturally and sometimes even politically more important than anything else in Australia. All of this made little impression. Footy to Zoe was like white noise. Put on a David Attenborough clip or a doco about cults or drug cartels and she’s instantly hooked. Maybe we should get Attenborough to do the Channel 7 commentary. It HAS to be better than BT:

Her parents, sophisticated New Yorkers, were completely bewildered by this bizarre Australian tribal ritual. Perhaps for the first time Zoe herself began to sense there was something bigger and more universal about the tribalism of Australian football. To further the Americans’ anthropological understanding, I carefully explained to them what had happened during that encounter in a clear, honest and objective way. That Collingwood and people wearing black and white scarves were noble, heroic followers of ‘the true way’ and we would one day reach our just reward by winning Grand Finals and being triumphant over our enemies and this was a cause worth supporting like ending single use plastic or animal cruelty. Whereas Richmond, the ones with the black and yellow scarves were part of a dangerous cult of extremists who were literally batshit crazy, completely feral and just downright dangerous like the KKK or the NRA or the Manson Family. That they should be avoided at all costs and pray God never ever win any more premierships.

After seeing one another for almost two years Zoe was beginning to worry that she had never seen me cry. It was, she claimed, “unnatural.” She cried all the time, at bad movies, at songs and even advertisements. I had experienced the loss of friends and family members and all kinds of life challenges during our relationship but had never once shed a tear. Perhaps she pondered, I was some class of low-level sociopath. I mean, I wasn’t trying to be John Wayne or anything, I just don’t buy this proposition women put forward that they want us to cry. I’ve always felt it’s a bit of a ruse to try and get the upper hand and I’m not falling for it. Possibly it’s just another example of feminism gone mad, who knows. Anyway, I’m not signing up for the great sook fest. So there.

So, on I went with my stoic, 1950s manliness. On into September where the Pies had found themselves valiantly destroying the Richmond Cult in the Prelim thanks to the heroics of the big Texan Mason Cox. (USA! USA!) And then the Grand Final came around against West Coast and we found ourselves together watching it in the aptly named Grand View Hotel in Fairfield, my local suburb in Melbourne. Well at least I was glued to the screen in a crowded, noisy, Collingwood dominated pub that was reverberating with the shock waves of it all. She was reading articles on her phone about Mason Cox and his Democratic political ideals and going to the bar repeatedly to order me whiskey on the rocks to nullify the rising sense of panic and hysteria building inside me that the lead the Pies had amassed in the first quarter was slowly melting away to nothingness and the Bad Thing was in danger of happening again. That horrible childhood trauma where we look like winning for pretty much the whole game and then it all comes down to a horrifying Shakespearean final act. Just like 1979…

When the Bad Man slots the goal, I have had five whiskeys and I feel like I am experiencing a recurring nightmare from which I will never escape. The final minutes pass. We fail… again… and images of a crushed Nathan Buckley and Taylor Adams fill the screen. Even Taylor, that hard man of Collingwood, that trench soldier who gives everything for the jumper, can’t hold back his tears. It’s too much for me. Forty years of following Collingwood catch up with me in a millisecond like the Hoover Dam exploding and I become literally a human geyser, a burst fire hydrant, sobbing uncontrollably. I flop helplessly, child-like into my girlfriend’s unprepared arms while onlookers, even other relatively stunned and disappointed Pies fans watch in stupefied silence, the spectacle of this grown man completely losing his shit in front of everyone. And for a few moments Zoe is gratified, cradling me in her arms, thinking, he HAS got emotion and he CAN show it and I AM the one he wants to comfort him in times of trouble. Just at that moment two large Collingwood supporters wearing scarves come up and pat me on the back and say “It’s OK mate, we feel your pain.” Instantly I detach myself from Zoe, flip around and collapse into their arms, continuing to sob uncontrollably into their chests.

I tried later on to repress that memory. But Zoe always brings it up with friends as a watershed moment in our relationship. But one where she was shown to be on an equal footing with “random Collingwood men at the pub.” For my part, whenever I drive past The Grand View I think of it as “The Bad Place.” I have never been back to The Bad Place and I want The Bad Man to die a thousand (metaphorical) deaths, to go to that special hell with Wayne Harmes, Kevin Bartlett and Jason Akermanis and all of the other dementors who have tormented our poor pathetic Collingwood souls.

We moved to Geelong in 2019 and enjoyed the relative tranquility of that ‘small town’. For a time I sought solace in trying to pretend I was a Geelong supporter, to shed myself of the stigma and vitriol reserved for Pies fans. Whenever I raised the matter with my friends (half-jokingly) they seemed so affronted and outraged that I would ever consider changing teams that I eventually gave up on the idea realising that whether I liked it or not I was doomed to be a Collingwood supporter for life. The funny thing to me was I felt like if I told my friends I’d decided to change religions or go in for gender reassignment they would have just shrugged and said, “Good for you mate.” But try to even suggest you’re changing AFL teams and it’s like you are Judas Iscariot crossed with Lucifer crossed with Hitler.

As another coping mechanism I told Zoe I no longer followed football and for a while I believed this was true. I stopped watching games and obsessing about scores but like any form of addiction it was hard, if not impossible to completely switch off. Zoe for her part was extremely sceptical:

“There is no way you’re giving up on Collingwood.”

“Well I am, it’s done. I am no longer following them.”

“I’ll believe it when I see it.”

When our wedding was cancelled due to being two weeks into the COVID pandemic we decided to elope and have a ‘COVID wedding’ with two friends from Geelong, Lenny and Grace, as our witnesses, all wearing face masks. There was no chance to honeymoon which for my travel-crazy wife was like a form of torture. We were forced to undergo the first weeks and months of married life inside the ‘Ring of Steel’ and in that time my attention drifted back to the Pies. Often as we sat having a drink, watching TV or eating dinner, she would catch me checking my phone again:

“Are you checking Collingwood things?”

“No.”

“You are, aren’t you?”

“No…”

“Really?”

“Ok… a bit.”

We wanted to have a baby. Just the one. Zoe argued that he or she should be kept free of football. Strangely I found myself advocating for Collingwood.

“But why would you want a child to go through what you have? Why would you want to screw them up that much?”

“Thanks.”

“No, I’m serious, for the amount of agonising you do over that team the actual joy you get is so minimal. It’s like a form of self-abuse. Why inflict that on an innocent child?”

I reasoned that being a Pies fan would give him or her a life-long connection to friends and family and their three older siblings that would be unbreakable. I left out the part about being universally hated by everyone else in the world. In the end it remained undecided.

In 2022, part of the great Richmond diaspora was the coming of Fly to Collingwood. And the AFL’s answer to Ted Lasso brought beautiful total football from his time at the Hawks and the Tiges and reinvented Collingwood as a team that wins and holds its nerve in tight contests. As the great Gerard Whately said, “They win the close ones.”

But would they win the one that counted?

In 2023 when it happened again and we made it into the Grand Final against Brisbane, I held my breath as always. To ward off the years of PTSD from lost Collingwood Grand Finals, I did what I usually do and pretended the game wasn’t happening. This is very hard when Collingwood are in the Grand Final because, literally more than any other event (births, deaths, marriages, drug interventions) it brings all the chickens home to roost. My phone blows up with all kinds of blasts from the past who if they only remembered one thing about me it’s that I live or die by what happens to Collingwood. And so the texts rolled in all that week:

They ranged from those who could actually put aside their Collingwood hate to genuinely wish me well:

“Good luck mate, hope they can do it for you.”

To those who feigned a kind of piss-weak encouragement concealing a thinly veiled support for the other team:

“Thinking of you on Saturday. May the best team win.”

To those that were clearly barracking for the Lions:

“Hope it’s a good game.”

Burying my head in the sand at this time was especially difficult, given just how wonderful this team had become. How exciting they were, how mentally tough, how much we loved Fly and his coaching and the leadership of Darcy Moore, the explosive brilliance of Daicos and De Goey, the last second heroics of Jamie Elliott, the timeless majesty of Pendles and Sidey. What a wonderful time to be alive. But I always went back into my shell again. As they say in Ted Lasso, “It’s the hope that kills you.”

As for Zoe, she didn’t even seem to remember that the Grand Final existed as she went about her daily affairs with absolutely zero knowledge or interest in football.

So it was easy for me to convince myself the Grand Final was not happening so I could get through the day. I drove to Melbourne Airport to pick up my daughter Imogen from Hockey Nationals. I checked the scores four or five times on my phone. Each time I did I could see the teams were locked together. It was, as it always is with Collingwood, harrowing, even when you decide not to watch it.

When we got through baggage claim and back to the car it was late in the last quarter. I told Imogen I needed to “go for a walk.” In truth I didn’t think it was safe to drive in the state I was in. Whilst walking I heard a young family heading to the terminal say that Collingwood were “ten points in front.” I high-fived the Dad in sheer joy. Then on returning to the car the margin was back to four points and it seemed the Bad Thing might still happen again. Then I checked the scores one more time moments later and saw the words ‘full time’ and underneath: Collingwood 90 Brisbane 86.

I stood there for a while, making sure I wasn’t hallucinating. Then I dove into the car and hugged my daughter for sheer joy. We drove home to Geelong with the radio playing and listened to the medal presentations. Each time we stopped at the lights I hugged her again and tousled her hair affectionately. I have learned how rare and perfect these moments are.

We made it home as the sun was setting on Sleepy Hollow. Upon entering the house Zoe came up and hugged me. Leander was wearing his little Collingwood jumper. And she handed me a bottle of whiskey she had bought and wrapped to celebrate.

She had remembered.