IT WASN'T quite to a Mighty Ducks level, but to the Curnows it was close.

Every day, when Ed and George Curnow would return from primary school, they'd collect their youngest brother Charlie from their hobby farm in Bellbrae. Their mum, Cassie, would shut them outside with their sisters, Charlotte and Eliza, and wouldn't let them come back in until she'd rung a cowbell-style triangle to alert them that dinner was ready.

Some days, they'd head to the local tip where they would collect discarded mattresses to line the walls of the aeroplane hangar situated on the farm. They would provide the padding for the intense games of hockey, played out on roller-skates, between the Curnow boys. The Mighty Ducks had been their favourite movie, after all.

On other days, they'd ride horses. Often, they'd build ramps to jump from on their bikes. A few times, they'd find whatever rope, piping and hay-band that was left lying around on the farm and build their own flying fox. Charlie, as the youngest and skinniest of the five, would always be the test dummy. If the homemade apparatus was going to hold anyone's weight, it would be his.

But even then, as young as four years old, he would climb up at the wishes of his brothers and sisters and zip down the dangling and unstable line without a second thought. "We'd say to Charlie, 'you're the littlest, you test it'. He'd go up there and he'd just drop. Mum knew every time because he'd always have dust on his face and some tear channels rolling down there," his older brother George says.

Charlie Curnow heads into this weekend's final round of matches three clear in the AFL's goalkicking tally, on the cusp of a remarkable Coleman Medal victory. But to understand what makes him the footballer he is, and what has made his return from almost three years of injury as incredible as it has been this season, you must first understand what makes Charlie Curnow the person he is.

AFL.com.au has traced Curnow's journey from B-Grade high school footballer, to budding AFL megastar cut down in his prime, back to being the gun forward lighting up games for Carlton once again.

'I can do it better'

THERE was skin hanging from Charlie Curnow's scalp where it wasn't meant to be.

This time, he had nose-dived from the surf at Winki Pop in Bells Beach into exposed reef and split his head open. It would be another trip to the hospital, following the countless other occasions when his parents, Dave and Cassie, had rushed him to the casualty ward as a young kid. This wasn't as bad as when he had suffered a compound dislocation of his elbow having fallen off his horse while chasing around his sisters a few years earlier, but it was close.

"He takes risks in whatever he does," George says. "When you're the youngest in a family of five, you want to impress. You want to say, 'I can do it better'. There were a lot of years of Charlie saying, 'I can do it better'. You normally just laugh at it, except for when he ends up in hospital."

Curnow, as a footballer, embodies his personality. He is naturally athletic, has a unique body shape that veers out at the shoulders and an endurance base that has, over time, become a distinct family trait. His oldest brother, Ed, is a 204-game AFL player and a teammate of his at Carlton. George was a gifted footballer himself for the Geelong Falcons and at VFL level with Box Hill. His eldest sister, Charlotte, competed at nationals level as a pentathlete. Eliza was a successful 800-metre runner.

But while Curnow has those same attributes, he also has something else that is intangible. The drive to say 'I can do it better' makes up for part of it. The willingness to take that next big risk makes up for the other.

"I feel like you play with guys and you just expect them to crash a pack or take a big mark or kick a clutch goal," Ed says. "They step up when you need them to. They're same type of people away from the field sometimes. They love to be on a skateboard and attempt a ridiculous jump. They love to paddle out into some surf that's quite big, or jump off some rocks that maybe they shouldn't. If you're taking that away from the individual, I'm not sure you get the footballer that is Charlie."

Ed concedes that his mentorship of his younger brother hasn't always been to follow the straight and narrow path. "I'm not sure the club has always loved that," he laughs. But, in doing so, he's encouraged Curnow to keep his hobbies outside of football and to continue being his authentic self in all aspects of his life.

But, once inside the football club, Curnow is the ultimate professional. Where once he would stay behind after training for extra conditioning work, a revised program after his recent spate of injuries no longer allows for the additional loads. So, now, he simply arrives earlier than his teammates to ping pre-training shots at goal.

He's driven on by Ed. They're relentless in their pursuit to beat each other in the 2km time trials over summer, while they're just as determined to get the upper hand in the depths of winter in one-on-one drills.

"If you want to talk about brotherly bonds, they're so similar yet so different," Curnow's manager Robbie D'Orazio says. "But they care so much about each other. I don't think Ed realises how much Charlie loves him, to be honest."

In most situations, the Curnow boys can simply be themselves and thrive in such an environment. That doesn't always include team meetings, though. "Charlie's more of a doer than a studier," Carlton assistant coach Ash Hansen laughs. "He says, 'hit me with the big-ticket items and let's go'."

It's a sentiment his manager can agree with. On the regular visits Curnow makes to the D'Orazio household, which are often meant to be centred around sponsorship opportunities and upcoming contractual obligations, he will instead spend the majority of his time mucking around with the kids. "My little man wears No.30 on his back because of Charlie," D'Orazio says. "He's more that student in the back of the room that will throw the paper aeroplane when the teacher turns around, rather than the one at the front of the room answering all of the questions."

Quite simply, Curnow is just a big kid himself. Perhaps nowhere has that shone through more than during the team's stint at the Royal Pines Resort on the Gold Coast during the COVID-19 interrupted 2020 season. While a line had already been put through Curnow's chances of returning from the knee injury that continued to keep him sidelined that season, his enthusiasm hadn't dissipated.

Performing strongly on the track – Blues insiders believe he could have returned late in the year, but the club took a cautious approach to his recovery – Curnow was instead forced to do his best work at the local beach. While not surfing himself, he would spend hours teaching the children of club staffers how to body board in the waves. "That's why so many people love him. It's that youthful exuberance that he displays. He connects with so many people," his former Carlton assistant coach John Barker says.

That version of Curnow, the one who is the last out of school holiday clinics, signing autographs or making a beeline to take selfies with his most excitable young fans, is the same Curnow playing on instinct in front of 50,000 supporters at the MCG on the weekends.

"In the AFL world, players can be forced to conform a lot. But he's just one of those guys where there's portions of him that you just need to let play," Barker says. "There are lot of funny little nuances to his game. One of them is where he takes a mark and he's 70m or 80m out and he just wheels around. We might not have anyone back inside the 50m arc, but he just goes. There's some instinct to it, but some of it is just his exuberance."

'He should have been their next pick'

WHEN the face of Charlie Curnow flicks on her TV, Karen Turner always has a giggle.

The wife of former Geelong Falcons talent manager Mick Turner, Karen was once a teacher at Torquay Primary School who taught most, if not all, of the Curnow family. There is a certain soft spot for Charlie, though. "Karen always said that Charlie was just a really nice, big kid. He was always very, very kind," Turner says.

Surprisingly, given the footballer he would one day become and the high draft pick he had been, Curnow had never really considered that a life as an AFL player could be part of his story. While both Ed and George were playing senior firsts football for their local club at 16, Charlie's interests were elsewhere at the same age. "There is the senior firsts side, the seconds and the thirds, then there's your Year 10 team, then there's your Year 10 B-team. Charlie was in that team," George laughs.

But once he developed into his six-foot, four-inch frame as he grew through his teenage years, there was little stopping him from dominating at both APS level with Geelong College and TAC Cup level with the Falcons. It was there that Curnow, unburdened by the pressures of life as a professional athlete, found his niche.

"Watching him at school, it was similar to watching him kick bags in the AFL," Ed says. "He used to just have so much fun, doing some pretty awesome things in the air. He'd lap it up with his mates and I feel like he's just doing that same stuff now."

Wearing the No.42 jumper for the Falcons, Curnow's talent was unrefined and untapped. His position, given his athletic profile, was just as much of an unknown. While some recruiters saw midfield potential, a finals game where he dominated in attack – he kicked four goals from eight marks and nine shots to take complete control of the contest, nearly dragging the Falcons to victory over the Rebels – solidified the belief that it was forward where he would thrive at the next level.

"I basically said, 'I'm not an AFL recruiter and I don't know what the draft pool is like out there … but from my experience, and I've been doing this for a long time, Charlie Curnow is potentially one of the best kids I've seen come through the program'," Turner says. "To me, he was potentially a top-five pick or even the No.1 pick."

And yet, some clubs still had doubts. Essendon held picks No.5 and No.6 in his draft year and had committed to taking his Falcons teammate Darcy Parish with its first selection. Needing a key-position player as well, Turner urged the Bombers to pair Parish with Curnow. They instead went for South Australian product Aaron Francis, leaving Carlton to pounce later in the draft at pick No.12. "This is no criticism of Essendon, because it's always hard in these instances, but he should have been their next pick," Turner says.

The perception, some believe, is that Curnow's flair and his attitude towards football had started to hurt his draft value. He continued to surf, he continued to skate, and he continued to treat the sport like a game that was there to be enjoyed and not endured. For Curnow, football would never be a job.

"AFL clubs might have thought he was a little bit immature, but that's just his personality," Turner says. "He's got that really nice personality. Sometimes when AFL clubs interview kids, they want that really hard edge to them I suppose. Maybe Charlie just came across as a big kid."

But for his former Carlton assistant coach Dale Amos, that's what would ultimately make him so distinctive. "He's not defined by being a footballer," Amos says. "He's an incredibly hard worker and he trains and prepares as hard and as well as anyone. But you watch him play and he looks like a big kid who is playing in the playground. That's kind of the way he views footy, I think. It's just something he loves to do."

'This bloke is a monster'

ASH HANSEN remembers studying the tape, unaware if he'd seen anything like it.

Then an assistant coach at the Western Bulldogs, Hansen had spent this particular June morning in 2019 reviewing a narrow victory over Carlton where Curnow had almost single-handedly dragged his team from 34 points down midway through the final quarter back to an incredible win.

Curnow had kicked seven goals, including five in a spellbinding second half, to pull the Blues to within three points of what would have been a remarkable comeback. "I just thought, 'this kid is obviously pretty special'," Hansen, now the forward line coach at Carlton, says.

Curnow, despite having just turned 21, looked increasingly capable of breaking every game wide open. Having provided a two-win Blues team with perhaps their only spark of optimism the season prior, bagging five goals against Richmond, four more against Port Adelaide and a couple of big marks in a nearly best-on-ground display against Collingwood, the precociously talented youngster had the world at his feet.

He signed a lucrative four-year contract extension, tied with his brother Ed for a top-three finish in the club's best and fairest count, and was becoming widely regarded as one of the competition's most exciting and skilful young players.

"Charlie used to kick a goal and he wanted people outside the stadium to know about it as well," George says. "He liked bringing that energy, not for himself but for the team. I think he knows that those moments are what only a few people on the field are paid to do. If there's a moment where he can lift the team, that's Charlie's favourite thing to do. He brings others up around him."

Curnow was always his most expressive on a footy field. And he wasn't just wowing people on game days, either. Just a few months after Curnow's breakout year, VFL star Michael Gibbons had been invited to train with Carlton in the hopes of joining the team as a pre-season Supplemental Selection Period recruit.

Along with fellow train-on hopeful Matt Cottrell, who would also later sign for the Blues, Gibbons was asked to complete a 2km time trial just 24 hours after he was called to vie for a spot on the club's list. Gibbons and Cottrell had always fancied themselves as runners and turned up confident of putting in a good time. Until, just minutes before they started, Curnow rocked up unannounced to run alongside them.

"I was gobsmacked," Gibbons says. "He's a genuine freak. He just blew everyone out of the water. I remember going, 'this bloke is a monster'. I couldn't work out how he was doing it. He trains so aggressively. He would stick around after a three-hour session and he would do one-on-one contested marking drills. He's a work horse."

Curnow's endless thirst to push himself on the track, combined with his output on weekends, made for an exciting combination. "He looked like he was about to explode," Amos says. But, as it would turn out, that seven-goal game against the Bulldogs would be the last full match he played in 776 days.

'It got him early and it got him big'

MICHAEL Gibbons remembers seeing a tweet, but scrolling past it.

It referenced an injury to Charlie Curnow, and maybe something about a basketball game. He can't really recall. Unless it came from a club official, he wouldn't be thinking twice about it. Only then he got a few texts, and his WhatsApp started blowing up. The worst news would soon be confirmed.

Earlier in the year, on a wet Sunday evening at Optus Stadium, Curnow had thrown himself into a typically robust contest against Fremantle's Ethan Hughes. It was the type of motion he would have backed himself into thousands of times before on a footy field. Only this time, his right knee buckled upon impact.

Scans in the coming days revealed a low-grade medial injury, with the ligament on the inside of his knee stretching as a result of the contact. "We think he'll miss three or four games," the club's high-performance boss Andrew Russell said at the time. He wouldn't play again for more than two years.

"It got him early and it got him big," Ed says, reflecting on the start of Curnow's nightmare run. "He's had this high of proving to himself that he can dominate the game, then he's brought back down to earth really quickly. You're watching all of your peers around you improve and catch up and go past you. I couldn't imagine the constant questioning he would have had on his ability to get to a level that he wanted to again."

The medial ligament issue kept a frustrated Curnow sidelined for the remainder of the season. Then, barely a month after the team's campaign finished in October, while playing a game of backyard basketball with teammates Patrick Cripps and Zac Fisher, he dislocated that same right knee. He would undergo surgery to stabilise his patella, the small bone located in front of the knee joint, with hopes he would begin running before Christmas and return to full training before the 2020 season.

But just one month after that setback, Curnow slipped while walking up a set of stairs in his home. The shock of the fall produced a high-level contraction to his quadriceps muscle, causing a large force to go through his knee. His surgically repaired right patella couldn't handle the load and fractured again.

"As much as anything, we missed his energy and that boyish way that he'd go about playing," Amos says of Curnow's absence. "He brings that whether you win or lose. He doesn't change. He still acts the same way, he still trains the same way, he still brings the same energy all of the time. As a group, we missed that as much as his talent."

COVID-19 forced Curnow to complete much of his rehab away from the club and, in April 2020, while doing dead lifts on his family farm, he felt a pang of pain. The screw holes from previous surgeries were exposing weaknesses to the same right patella and he had suffered a hairline stress response. Another entire season was ruined.

"His knee had been broken in half three or four times and it wasn't standing up to doing a simple dead lift," Ed says. "How's it going to go against the best backlines in the competition?  It would've been difficult. There's no doubt. The injuries he had were pretty horrific."

In classic Curnow fashion, he turned to outside activities to sustain him during rehab. There was a business management degree and some work experience in property and real estate sectors. He even took on the task of project managing his own renovations at his new house. "He's more entrepreneurial than he thinks," D'Orazio says.

In November 2020, having all but returned to full training and ramping up his efforts to play at the start of the following season, Curnow sustained yet another stress injury to his patella. It would be the fifth setback to the same right knee in just over a year. A specialist orthopaedic surgeon was called in to provide one more operation, ruling him out for yet another six months.

"They're a really close group, so to see him go down with so many major injuries, you could see the empathy there for him," Carlton football boss Brad Lloyd says. "Not just because he's such a talent, but the person he is. He's a really loved teammate. It would've hurt them."

From there it was left to Russell and the club's head of medical, Rohan Hattotuwa, to devise a carefully curated plan for Curnow's comeback. By that stage, though, doubts had understandably crept in regarding whether he could ever return to being the player he once was.

"Charlie didn't just have football removed from him, he had all of his outlets removed from him," George says. "There's your knee and there's your football career, but then you've got to ask what percentage of your life is football? We also wanted to see Charlie out in the surf and have a fully functioning knee for the rest of his life. Sometimes, that's a little bit forgotten. Supporters and clubs want players to get back up for their time, but you also want it for the rest of his time as well."

'With Charlie, everything is a bit different'

FOR THE few who had ventured out to Ikon Park, there was plenty to be excited about.

New recruits Adam Cerra and George Hewett had lit up Carlton's pre-season practice match against St Kilda, skipper Patrick Cripps looked back to his best, and gun youngster Corey Durdin was impressive. Charlie Curnow, though, looked as rusty as anything.

Held goalless by Saints swingman Josh Battle, who was being trialled in a new defensive role for the first time, Curnow hardly got near it as he completed his first hitout of the 2022 campaign. After returning for the final four games of last season, this was Curnow's first test with a full summer of training behind him. It was a less-than-convincing start.

Then, in a barnstorming round one victory over Richmond just a couple of weeks later, he barely got any closer. "There was always a level of the unknown that we were going into," Hansen says.

There shouldn't have been any doubts, though. Tying up a neat circle after his last big performance back in 2019, Curnow kicked five goals against the Western Bulldogs in round two. This was a statement game. He was back. "It's extraordinary, to be honest," Barker says, referencing Curnow's return to form.

He wasn't done there. There was three more against Hawthorn the very next week, then five against Port Adelaide, six against Adelaide, six against Sydney, four against Collingwood, four against Fremantle, five against West Coast, four against Greater Western Sydney. The goals just kept coming, and they haven't stopped. "The trajectory he's gone on this year, it's been outstanding," Hansen says.

Curnow has surged beyond all reasonable expectations of what he could, and would, achieve in his comeback season. He's currently kicked 62 goals for the year, three ahead of Jeremy Cameron and seven clear of Tom Hawkins and Tom Lynch in the Coleman Medal race with one match remaining. Last Saturday night against Melbourne, he again lifted to the occasion and was nearly the match-winner with his composed set-shot late in the final term.

Next up, on Sunday, he will spearhead Carlton's last-gasp chance of breaking a decade-long finals drought. Given he will look to do so against the old rivals Collingwood, and on the biggest stage of all at the MCG, you wouldn't bet against another big haul.

It will come after a season in which Curnow's sole focus has been set on returning to being the player he once was. Countless sponsorship opportunities have been shelved, and even more media requests have been denied. He has let his football do the talking.

"Personally, I could see it coming because I knew the confidence he had within himself," D'Orazio says. "I could tell by the way he was talking to me and the confident conversations that we were having that this kid wasn't done yet."

For those closest to him, the goals, the marks and the raucous celebrations have been enjoyable to watch. But it's the cheekiness and the pep returning to his personality that has been the most rewarding to see. He is, finally, acting like that big kid once again.

"He just has a mentality where he says, 'no … it's going to work'. And then it works," George says. "I know it was very difficult for him, but he tried to just stay positive about it all. We were all pretty positive about him coming back, but that was only because he made us feel that way. He manifested it and it just happened.

"I don't know if there have been many stories quite like it. You look at an injury like that and you think he won't get back. But with Charlie, everything is a little bit different. He says he's going to do it and you believe it as well."