I ONCE met a woman called Nancy who had danced with Chicken Smallhorn during the 1930s Depression.

She was a passionate Fitzroy supporter and, in her words, a pretty good sort in those days. He asked her for a dance one Saturday night. When she told me this, she was in her eighties.

She said he was a great dancer. It sounded like she was describing something that had happened the day before.

Smallhorn won one Brownlow Medal; Haydn Bunton Junior won three, and Nancy liked him too. During her lunch break she would rush from the Fitzroy factory where she worked down to Foy & Gibson’s department store in Collingwood in the hope of catching a glimpse of the dapper legend selling someone or other a suit.

When the Hall of Fame Tribute Match is played, I would like to think that it will be in part a tribute to Chicken, to Bunton – and to Nancy. It will be an honouring of those men who are in the Hall of Fame, but also a celebration of the whole history of the game.

It should be a tribute to the players and administrators who evangelised for the sport far beyond Victoria’s borders, and for the bush players who never had a chance in the big league.

It should embody the spirit of improvisation and participation that characterised the English rugby team which augmented its tour of this country in 1888 with 25 games played under Australian Rules. 

It should be a contemporary reflection of the games traditional greatness. So, when Buddy or Fev send the crowd wild with a piece of goalkicking artistry, we might recall the late 19th century when critics bickered about the emergence of showy forwards like Mick Grace and Albert Thurgood.

The churlish argument was that their individuality detracted from the ethos of footy as a team game.

When Alan Didak steals a goal, some may recall that an early nickname for Collingwood was The Purloiners.

When Richo hits a pack, we may try to picture him in the early Tasmanian colours of rose, primrose and black.

When Brett Burton flies, it is an echo of the dazzling leaps of Charlie ‘Commotion’ Pearson whose aerial work inspired emulation in schoolyards across the city and had the naysayers worrying about students suffering injuries in kick to kick.

As the Victorian and Dream Team players run out in jumpers woven from space-age fabrics and wearing boots with computer-modelled soles, think about the men who strapped their shoulders with chamois leather, wore knickerbockers to below the knee (a look Lion Michael Reeves just failed to revive in the 1980s), and hammered nails into their boots for grip. (The nails were soon outlawed, replaced by strips of rough leather tacked across boot soles.)

Try to smell the palm oil the oldtimers used as liniment, and the fetid stink of the mudheaps in the middle of suburban grounds in midwinter.

Listen to the crowd: today’s group just one part of a continuum, replenished and replaced as generations succeed generations, but always loud, always passionate, always integral to it all.

The Tribute Match is for the crowd, too – the crowd now, the crowd that used to be, and the crowd to come when today’s supporters are inevitably bolstered and then replaced.

Think of the players who move interstate. Ryan Griffen, Nick Riewoldt, Adam Cooney are just the most recent of hundreds of players funnelled to Victorian clubs from around the country.

David Wirrpanda and Chris Judd are contemporary manifestations of the footballers who flooded from Victoria to Western Australia after gold was discovered in Kalgoorlie in 1893.

The Tribute Match should be for everyone. The sloggers who managed three senior games and the elite who won three Brownlow Medals.

The innovators who believed the indigenous code had a future, and the administrators who will decide the direction of the sport in coming decades.

The fans who travelled to the MCG on overloaded cable trams in 1888, and the diehards who travel hundreds of kilometres for bush games every weekend in 2008.

For Wilf ‘Chicken’ Smallhorn, a 62 kilogram rag doll who played for Victoria seven times and was a Brownlow top-tenner five times. And for Nancy, and all the other Nancies: the ones who keep the stories alive.