Mackay, 20, overcame an injury-ravaged first year in Adelaide to play 19 games in his second season and take out the Mark Bickley award as the club's best first- or second-year player.
Now, just two weeks out from the official start of pre-season, there's another young Crow hoping to follow the same script.
Myke Cook, Adelaide's fourth pick (38) in the 2007 NAB AFL Draft, appreciates the challenges Mackay faced in his first year at an AFL club all too well.
Cook, 19, arrived in Adelaide with aspirations of playing senior footy, but instead he took over Mackay's regular position – running laps around the AAMI Stadium boundary line.
"I came to the club with a bad knee, so I worked hard to get back training and then during a pre-season Saturday session I jagged my hamstring," Cook said.
"I only missed a few weeks and ended up playing rounds one and two, but during those games I just wasn't 100 per cent and my body just didn't feel right."
Weeks later at another training session Cook's fears were confirmed when he suffered a major tear to the same hamstring. He embarked on the gruelling six-week rehabilitation program only to suffer a recurrence of the injury.
"About four weeks into my third recovery, the hamstring started feeling a little bit tight. I had to pull out of a training session and I went off to have a scan," Cook said.
"The way the doctor explained it to me was that the affected hamstring, which should be about 4cm in diameter, was only 2cm, so it just wasn't strong enough."
Cook, with his season slipping away, underwent a relatively new procedure called a blood autologous injection in a bid to heal his wasted hamstring.
The new age remedy, which involved injecting blood from his arm into his hamstring to promote scar tissue, kept Cook off his feet for another eight weeks, but allowed him finally to regain strength in his troublesome leg.
In August, after a few trips home to Victoria and four months out of the game, Cook returned to the Panthers' reserves. The gritty onballer played three games in the twos before a second-consecutive best on ground performance in round 21 earned him a round 22 SANFL debut.
"Getting a league game at the end of the year was a really good reward and I got some good feedback from the coaches," Cook said.
"They said it was good to see me finish the season off like that. I was pretty happy with that and it spurred me to crack in over the pre-season."
Cook, buoyed by Mackay's achievements last season, is approaching the summer full of optimism.
"All year, the coaching and medical staff at the club told me to really use D-Mac [Mackay] as a model. We had slightly different injuries, even though his was still a hamstring, but it kept us both out of the game for pretty much the same amount of time," Cook said.
"Whenever I started having negative thoughts, I would go up to Dave and ask what he did in this particular situation or how he felt.
"So for me to see that he went through almost exactly the same thing as me and came out the next year to play 19 games – it really helped me and made me see that there are going to be chances for me to play AFL footy next year."
