Sometimes sport can be about so much more than the game.

When days are dark, we all go searching for things that give us hope, or some relief. Somewhere to lose yourself. Something to be part of, something bigger and better than your own life.

Right now, for many of us experiencing lives confined to four (way too familiar) walls, the best escape is sport. In our own backyards, on the other side of the country, or the other side of the world.

Like a concert, a sporting event is the coming together of a tribe. A group of people joined in their love and passion for an artform – whether it’s playing guitar or taking a spectacular mark.

This year, as another reminder of how Covid has shredded all the normal things in our lives, the AFL Grand Final features two Melbourne teams battling it out … in Perth.

I lived in Victoria for more than 20 years before I went to a football game. For much of that time, I observed my friends’ enthusiasm for AFL with wry bemusement.

Then I met Cal. To say I fell in love with a man obsessed with football was to understate it. Living with him transformed winter weekends into a festival of football. Every game from the VFL through to the Grand Final was important.

He was passionate and opinionated – shouting directions and swearing at the TV – so loud the dog would slink off to his outside kennel to avoid the mayhem.

Footy was his passion and his pain, as Cal was a Demons supporter.

Arriving as a five-year-old, fresh off the boat from Scotland, his father told him to pick a team.

“Does Melbourne have a team,” he asked.

And with those five words, his fate was sealed. A Melbourne supporter until the end.

When Cal died in 2015, he was 47 years-old and for four decades he barracked for the Dees, never seeing them win a flag.

Which leaves me, a football novice and Dees fan by default, carrying the mantle for him on the last weekend of September, with Melbourne in a Grand Final for the first time in 21 years.

What a season it’s been. He would have loved it, even with all the Covid disruption, especially the preliminary final against Geelong, where they won by 83 points, playing with such skill and joy that everything they touched turned to gold.

He would have laughed at me, too anxious to watch a full game, following it instead online minute by minute, or watching a quarter here and there. Or maybe, like me, he would have been afraid that at some point, their miracle run would turn out to be a mirage, and the Dees would go plummeting down the ladder, out of the eight and into another year of obscurity.

But now here they are, at the big one.

I wish Cal was here too.

This weekend, I’ll be watching, praying for the win he never got to experience, and hoping if there is a somewhere, up there, it’s tuned into the AFL so he can watch too. And if he listens closely, he’ll hear me whisper: “Go Dees”.