http://www.watoday.com.au/afl/wester...13-p4z08y.html

Noon, grand final day. Bulldog club elder John Schultz stands at the changeroom door, greeting the players. He believes the Dogs can win. Has all year. The old champion foresaw all along that the bye makes it a season of two halves. One half is getting into the finals. The other half is what you do when you get there. If you’re a young team and get on a roll, anything can happen. He believes that’s the lesson of ’61 when a young Bulldog team made it to the grand final, the club’s last. Schultz shakes the hand of each player as he arrives. Marcus Bontempelli feels history slide through his palm.

It ''hits'' Zaine Cordy after he enters the Bulldog changerooms and sees his name on a locker. His father, three uncles and brother all played for the Dogs. Now, in only his 11th game and at the age of 19, he’s going where no Cordy has gone. He concentrates his mind on his role, on backing his instincts. ''Only way to play,'' he says. ''You don’t have time to think.''

Outside the grey walls of the stadium are thousands of people, rows of cars, fast-food trucks and statues of past footy gods like Haydn Bunton, Ron Barassi and ''Lethal'' Leigh Matthews. E. J. Whitten’s statue is not there, a sore point out west. Comedian Wil Anderson is broadcasting from a mobile booth for radio station Triple M. Standing amid the audience of match-goers who have paused to watch, he spots Jason McAinch, the kid at Haywood Primary School who attached him to the forlorn narrative that has been his lot as a Bulldog supporter up until this year, until this day. The comedian tries to suppress the thought that a glorious sunburst of joy might now be coming his way.

Jason McAinch is a farmer from Denison, a tiny place in eastern Victoria. Denison is surrounded by other tiny places like Winnindoo, Nambrok, Wurruk and Bundalaguah. People in all those places will be watching this game today, watching the drama about to unfold inside the high grey circular wall. People all around Australia are watching. Ashlea Wainwright is flying 65 hours to see this game and get back to work at her university in Brussels by Monday morning. People are about to watch the grand final in, among other countries, England, Ireland, Germany, Papua New Guinea, Japan, China, the United States and, most remarkably, Mongolia.

Fiona Wood, mother of Bulldog captain Easton, is rung by the aged-care facility she works for in Camperdown. A phone is passed among the 20-odd residents and, one by one, they wish her luck, even two who can’t speak. Easton dropped in to see them the last time he was home.

Tom Liberatore has forgotten his boots. Bulldog equipment manager Jayden Shea spots him rummaging through the spare boots case. ''I’ll just wear someone else’s,'' he says. ''You definitely won’t,'' says Shea who has a decisive edge about him. Under the anti-gambling rules, Libba has handed in his phone. They have to retrieve the phone to find the number of Libba’s housemate. Shea rings the housemate and directs him on a search of Libba’s room. Having unearthed two pairs of boots, the housemate is directed to call Uber and get a car to bring him and the boots to the MCG pronto. And that is how Libba’s boots, which play a big part in the afternoon’s events, arrive at the ground.

Annie Nolan meets her father-in-law, Billy Picken, inside the ground. He gives her ''the biggest hug''. Billy is one of a generation of Collingwood players haunted by grand-final failure. In a succession of grand finals in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, Collingwood were seen, rightly or wrongly, as having repeatedly fumbled premiership opportunities. At an individual level, Billy Picken played bravely and well. Even so, as a Collingwood player from that ill-fated period, a certain aura surrounds his name to do with unrequited ambition and grand-final disappointment. Now his son Liam is about to step on to the stage and meet his football destiny …

Trainer Kev O’Neill hands the 1954 Australian penny given to him during the grand-final parade to coach Luke Beveridge for good luck. Six survivors from the Bulldogs’ only VFL/AFL premiership team, the men of ’54, visit the Bulldogs rooms before the match – Ron Stockman, Harvey Stevens, Don Ross, Jimmy Gallagher, Dougie Reynolds and Angus Abbey. Beveridge chats with them for 10 or 15 minutes, asking them questions about the club as they knew it and how their careers had started. ''He had no airs or graces,'' Ron Stockman tells me, adding slightly mystified, ''He was calm as a cucumber.''

The Bulldogs’ equipment manager Jayden Shea remembers the Bulldogs’ rooms being relaxed. ''We'd had such a big build-up. We’d come so far. We just had to do it once more.'' The Dogs have Brad Lynch running in the grand-final sprint. There’s a bit of banter among the boys about that.

The first warm-up, before the pre-match entertainment, is only 15 minutes. Bonty (Marcus Bontempelli) uses it to look around, to try and adjust to the colours and noise. JJ (Jason Johanissen) uses it to get a feel of the ground. Literally. He lies down on the 50-metre arc and tells Dale Morris he’s going to catch ''a quick 10''. On his back, looking up at the sky, he notes what a sunny day it is. Telling me this, he remarks, ''I’m actually a really relaxed person.'' Fletcher Roberts has had a difficult week, not knowing he was playing until Thursday, then putting his mind to the subject of his likely opponent, high-rise 203-centimetre forward Kurt Tippett. His friend Jack Macrae says, ''It is so tough not knowing if you’re playing – he had the stress of that.'' Roberts says that it is only during the warm-up that he starts to feel ''a bit normal''.

Steve Wallis played 261 games for the Dogs from 1983 to 1996 but never made it to a grand final. Now his son, Bulldog midfielder Mitch Wallis, will miss also, having suffered the club’s most traumatic injury, a broken leg that left the bottom section of his leg flapping in round 18. Steve and Mitch flew to Sydney for the preliminary final, Mitch’s first flight since the injury. They went to the GWS game simply as Bulldog supporters and cheered as lifelong fans. When the Dogs won, father and son embraced and father shouted, ''We’re going to win the grand final, Mitch!'' Now, one week later, Mitch Wallis walks out onto the MCG to sense the grand-final atmosphere, knowing he’s not playing. To his surprise, Sydney’s Gary Rohan, who broke his leg badly in 2014, runs the length of the ground ''to check out how I was going''. ''I will forever respect him for that,'' says Mitch. ''It’s my duty to be there for someone else who goes through this.''

Jack Macrae says no-one’s really 100 per cent fit. He’s ''pretty confident'' in his hamstring. Easton Wood thinks he’s got six leaps in his right ankle before it’s ''cooked''. Here is the Bulldog club doctors’ bill of health for the grand final team: “JJ and Hamling both have slight calf strains; Hunter has knee issues; Macrae’s hamstring is still a concern. He was the riskiest one coming back early. Cordy has a minor fracture in his upper back; Stringer has had chronic AC joint soreness since the Suns game; Dickson has toughed it out with groin soreness for the past six weeks. Tom Boyd has the unstable shoulder he has played with all year; he also sprained an ankle against Freo in the last roster match. Dunkley is carrying an ankle injury; Caleb Daniel has a torn cartilage and a bit of floating bone in his shoulder. A couple of games it has popped out. Morris has fractures through his transverse processors (bones attached to the vertebrae of his back).”

The previous week, a ball kicked into Jordan Roughead’s face resulted in bleeding between the retina and the lens of his right eye. The Bulldog ruckman has only been cleared to play in the grand final at 10 o’clock that morning. The docs, Jake Landsberger and Gary Zimmerman, feel the team’s medical issues are ''under control''. They feel ''unusually confident'' and believe the players do, too.

Club psychologist Lisa Stevens has been on the journey with the Bulldog players for three years. She has been a safe place for their stories, she’s been an astute observer and, when requested, a guide. She writes of grand final day: ''Many have contributed to paying the admission price to play today, but I am acutely aware that only 22 get to lace up their boots for the Big Dance. The fickle hand of form and fate deals out limited passes to the dream. The three emergencies don’t know which way it’s going until that first siren.'' She will wait with them in the empty rooms listening, sharing the question beating in their minds which she expresses this way: ''Is it boots or suits?''

Matthew Boyd is beating the drum, building up to the match. We’ve beaten them twice on their home deck, we’re primed, we’ve got real potency, good mix of attack and defence. Joel Hamling, who will play on Buddy Franklin, is seen by many as the Bulldogs’ weakest link. Although he didn’t manage a single senior game in his three years at Geelong, when you watch the Bulldogs over the course of 2016, in which he played 12 matches, you see that his form was solid. The only time he looked out of his depth was against Geelong when he was played as a forward. In all the other games he’s been serviceable, steady, equal to the occasion. What he does well, he does surprisingly well. In the course of the finals, he has held his own against the elite of AFL forwards – West Coast’s Josh Kennedy, Hawthorn’s Cyril Rioli and Jack Gunston, GWS’s Jeremy Cameron. Life has brought him to this moment for a reason, he believes. Whatever’s thrown at him, he’ll throw back.

Trainer Frank Dimasi has been confident all week. On Sunday, he sent a text to Beveridge congratulating him on the two premierships he’d been involved with over the previous weekend – the Footscray VFL team and Sandringham in the VFL under 18s. Beveridge’s son Kye was in the Sandringham team. Beveridge’s reply was short: ''ONE MORE TO GO FRANKIE.'' Frank remembers what he calls ''the warm-up to the Big Dance''. ''The playing group were so relaxed – except for Keith [Matthew Boyd] – but we expect that. No over-the-top antics, nerves were in check, behaving like just another game really. Then that look from The Bont (Marcus Bontempelli). He noticed me swaying to the pre-game rap music which just oozed through my body and calmed me down – I found myself so relaxed. The Bont looked at me and gave me this massive smile and nod of the head, as if to acknowledge welcome to our playground – ‘IT’S OUR TIME’.”

Out in the stadium, this restless bowl of animated colour holding 99,982 people, a sign appears on the giant scoreboard saying 13 members of the Swans team have played in an AFL grand final, eight in a premiership. The Dogs have no players in either category. Once upon a time, this would have been taken as a sign that the Swans were going to win. But that logic doesn’t work any more. Not here. John Schultz says the Dogs have got no baggage. It’s all just new and exciting.''

In Perth before the first final, Beveridge told them to run towards the fire. Now his word is fury. But he aligns fury with two other words, system and persistence. ''The pain of discipline is less than the pain of disappointment.'' He gives me his list of 14 scenarios that he foresees might arise in the course of the grand final and the moves that will be made to counter them. These are expressed in highly compressed language using code words. For example, Scenario 2, ''A mid hurting us with their transition and possession.'' One of three proposed solutions is ''Consider Bonty to expose him.'' Beveridge will back 20-year-old Bonty to beat Sydney’s best midfielder. Scenario 9A: ''Franklin coming up to the stoppage.'' Two responses. ''A: Trust our system. B: Moz (Dale Morris) go all the way with him.'' A partnership of Libba and Jack Macrae is responsible for Sydney midfield star Luke Parker while Bonty and 19-year-old Josh Dunkley are responsible for Swans captain Josh Kennedy.

Easton Wood leads the Western Bulldogs from their rooms beneath the MCG. Turning, they stride up the race. The ground appears as a pocket of blue and some roof from the Great Southern Stand followed by a giant light tower looming down, then they come into the crowd’s view and are swallowed by an ocean of noise and colour. ''You think you can imagine what the roar is like,'' says equipment manager Jayden Shea, ''but it’s like nothing you’ve ever imagined.'' Libba says, ''I nearly shit myself. Yeah, definitely, I couldn’t hear anything.'' Trainer Paul Maher sensed the rising excitement and tension during the first warm-up. Walking out the second time he meets the roar like a thunderclap that shakes him. ''Oh, God,'' he thinks, ''this is it!'' Jake Stringer feels ''massive vibrations'' in his body. Tory Dickson coolly registers that the Dogs have more support. The roar makes Liam Picken ''half excited, half nervous. It lasts five seconds, then you’re back into the moment.'' Bonty says it wasn’t as loud to him as it might have been to some of the others because he was thinking.

The Bulldogs’ grand final banner:We’ve beaten all the othersDefied all of the oddsToday this team of puppiesBecome true BullGods