INSTEAD of WAGS straight from the social pages and certain Collins Street jewellers there are mums and dads direct from the suburbs and country towns, and instead of designer frocks and tuxedos there is business wear and club suits and ties.

The NAB AFL Rising Star award ceremony is less Brownlow than school presentation night.

There's even an official portrait to be taken, with the little tackers sitting on chairs in the front row and the big blokes standing behind.

So there's Allen Christensen underneath big Zac Clarke and even bigger Zac Smith, and Luke Dahlhaus tucked away on the end of the line, even though his hair alone almost qualifies him for the back row.

Some of the 20 nominees on hand at the Crown Palladium - the three Eagles (Luke Shuey, Jack Darling and Andrew Gaff) are in Perth preparing for their first final, and Tiger Reece Conca is recuperating after surgery - are interviewed pre-function, and almost to a man they name Essendon's Dyson Heppell as the likely winner. 

Inside the Palladium posters of the nominees hang from the ceiling like at a prize fight, but the atmosphere is all sweetness and light. There are no losers here, no knockout punches to be thrown.

(Earlier Collingwood's Alex Fasolo and Gold Coast's David Swallow, both products of East Fremantle, had greeted each other like long-lost brothers, with Fasolo even shifting from his original place for the official photo to stand next to his former teammate.)

The young men march single file into the Palladium, and step onto a spotlighted podium as their names are called in the order of the rounds in which they were nominated.

Heppell is the round-one nominee and he walks on stage with coach James Hird, who has the air of a benevolent uncle, as his former under-12s basketball coach Andrew Westaway is interviewed about how they lost a regional championship because his star player was indisposed.

Heppell had woken up unwell, been sent to run laps of a footy field in an attempt to make him throw up - an activity that, apparently, would have somehow made him feel better - declared himself unable to play, and then decided to hit the court anyway.

As Westaway tells it, Heppell immediately grabbed a rebound, bolted to the other end of the court, hit the basket and kept on running, throwing up all the way.

At such events video 'highlights' are sometimes less than advertised, but the vignettes shown to the audience are genuinely entertaining. And in the case of one featuring Luke Shuey, genuinely affecting.

We see grainy film of Shuey as a six-year-old having a kick with his mates, and then the young Eagle talking about his long battle with injury and the loss of his 17-year-old sister in a road accident. He keeps her photos in his locker, and says the support he received from the club after his bereavement made him realise he would stay an Eagle forever.

Geelong trio Christensen, Daniel Menzel and Mitch Duncan compete in four kicking drills, with Menzel the winner 3-1 over Christensen. Duncan gets a doughnut.

Menzel takes out the torp contest - it's fair to say none of them is likely ever to rival Dustin Fletcher - as well as the hitting-the-post test and the lobbing-the-pill-into-the-ball-bin challenge. Christensen wins the banana goalkicking.

When Heppell is announced as the winner of the Ron Evans Medal, he shakes hands with Hird, skipper Jobe Watson and the others on the Essendon table. There's a kiss for mum and his girlfriend Kate, who gets a special mention in his acceptance speech for her willingness to get up early in the cold and the wet to have a kick with him.

There's more than a touch of the Daniher about Heppell, with his laconic country boy drawl and easy sense of humour. He is as calm and composed on the stage as he is on the footy field.

Speaking afterwards to the media, there's an inordinate focus on his haircut. Perhaps Hird has brought this on him, with the coach responding to a question about how alike their playing styles were with, "Other than a bad hairdo, there's not much of a similarity".

For his part, Heppell insists his Dale-Thomas-meets-Justin-Bieber style is his alone: "It's my own do … a bit of a surfie hairdo".

Mum films the event on her phone, as does former basketball coach Westaway. Girlfriend Kate is texting. It's a very modern-day setting for a player with old-fashioned virtues - reading the play, using the ball well, and having that most valuable of football gifts, time.

The views in this article are those of the author and not necessarily those of the AFL or its clubs