Vince’s progression from knockabout country lad to the top Crow of 2009 was as rapid as it was stunning. A new-age footballer entering the system in an old-fashioned way, a professional player who retains a simple outlook on life, Vince is the classic example of a boy plucked from relative anonymity who turns out to be good. In Vince’s case, really good.

Nevertheless, Vince openly, and jokingly, admits he never saw a future for himself as a top-level footballer. The boys who played in state under-16 and under-18 competitions, the ones who only ever dreamed of playing in the AFL, were the ones with a future in the sport.Vince never had that at the forefront of his mind.

If the chance came up, he wouldn’t knock it back, but as much as he loved playing the game, “never in my wildest dreams did I think I’d ever make it to the top level”. Put simply, he didn’t think it was realistic, so there was no need to worry about it.

What becomes clear during the interview is that Vince isn’t someone to worry too much. Perhaps the easy-going environment he was part of as a junior made the big league feel so far away.

“I was just playing footy with my mates really, and I would’ve been laughed at if I ever talked about trying to make it as a footballer.”

Vince was playing in country South Australia - Stansbury on the Yorke Peninsula to be specific - and his pathway to being drafted by the Crows was anything but conventional. He missed a draft he was eligible for as an 18-year-old, but not through lack of talent.

In his own words: “When you say I missed the draft - I never would have even thought about it back then,” he said. Vince continued to play for the impressively named Curramulka-Minlaton-Stansbury Crows, until receiving a call asking him to trial for the Woodville-West Torrens Eagles in the SANFL.

In line with his belief that he’d never reach the elite level, Vince initially knocked back the chance, instead preferring to stay at home where he had a job and was enjoying local footy.

By chance, though, the Stansbury season finished two weeks before the Eagles’ season, so Vince headed to Adelaide to play two under-19s games at the end of 2004.Having never completed a proper pre-season until he was drafted by Adelaide - Vince was a promising cricketer, with the game taking up most of his summer - he came back to the Eagles at the start of 2005 with “nowhere near the fitness level required”.

He played a couple of reserves games, got dropped and didn’t think too much about it. He laughs at the memory, but is a little sheepish about his attitude to football back then.“It didn’t really worry me too much. It probably should have but, when I got dropped, I thought, ‘Oh well, I can go back home and play with my mates in the positions I want’,” the 24-year-old said.

A series of “blink-of-the-eye” moments saw Vince drafted by the end of that year, and yet, even as he got closer to the pinnacle, he felt nothing much would come of it. That the story would stop there and he would go back to Stansbury and have a few good tales to tell his mates and, later in life, his grandchildren. How wrong he was.

Read the full story in this week’s edition of the AFL Record, available at all grounds.