DANE Swan’s mind instantly went to Las Vegas. He was supposed to be on a plane next Saturday for his end-of-season holiday.

There had been silence initially after the siren but now there was chaos.

Nick Maxwell was visibly upset and acting as if there should be extra time.

“It’s not right. It’s not right. This is a joke,” he said.

Scott Pendlebury thought he was going to be required to play another 10 minutes and was worried he didn’t have anything more to give.

Leigh Montagna was confused when the teams started to get into their own huddles.

“The players got in a huddle and I was like, ‘Hang on a minute, have they changed the rules?’,” he said.

“There was that split second where I thought we might be playing extra time.”

AFL chief executive Andrew Demetriou had made his way onto the ground after a quick meeting with key staff in the function room upstairs.

He approached the captains – Maxwell and Nick Riewoldt – who were now standing alongside each other trying to make sense of the situation.

The Collingwood captain didn’t hold back when he saw the league boss while Riewoldt simply asked: “You’re pretty happy aren’t you Andrew? But can you change your mind?.”

Coming back the following week was a financial bonanza for the AFL but Demetriou wasn’t the only one secretly excited about that scenario.

Luke Ball had been on the bench for the final three minutes, which had given him time to process all three possible outcomes.

“In the end I was almost a touch relieved when the siren went,” he said.

“I thought OK I can have another go at it and hopefully I will handle the week better this time around. I will be fresher.

“And I thought we had more upside a week after. With young blokes sometimes you have to lose one to come back and appreciate it the next year but these young blokes were going to get another go in a week’s time so they’ll be better for it.”

Dal Santo had finished with the ball in his hands when the siren sounded. His hamstring had survived a couple of moments where he thought it was going to tear off the bone and as he tried to make sense of what was going on around him, he knew he’d be better in seven days time.

“I got through the game, I didn’t play overly well and I remember thinking, ‘I get another week of recovery and I’m going to definitely contribute more than I did today’.”
Lenny Hayes was physically spent and had lost his voice, which wasn’t ideal when an AFL official came up and told him that he’d won the Norm Smith Medal and would be required to say a few words.

Collingwood president Eddie McGuire was in full voice in a small huddle with coach Mick Malthouse, football manager Geoff Walsh and Maxwell.

He was adamant that the team should attend the post-game function at Crown Casino and he had history on his side.

After the last Grand Final draw in 1977 North Melbourne had gone to their function afterwards and Collingwood didn’t. The following week the Kangaroos romped home in the replay.

Malthouse didn’t need to have his arm twisted; he’d already made the decision that his players would be attending the dinner despite Maxwell’s protests.

And if things couldn’t get any more bizarre, the excess water in the basins that Ross Lyon had spotted at halftime had turned into a full-on sewerage flood, which meant the teams had to be relocated to the Great Southern Stand.

For an hour the players had to wait for their gear to be brought back around.

“It was a nightmare,” Swan said.

“We were just sitting in these old school change rooms under the Southern Stand just kicking rocks thinking what a pain in the arse the whole thing was.”

Malthouse called for a show of hands of those who wanted to attend the dinner. No-one did. He then asked who didn’t want to go. And got the same result.

“What they were effectively saying to me was, ‘You make up your mind boss’. The good thing about that group of boys was if I said something they would try to do it.”

Three hours later McGuire watched the man who he’d poached from the West Coast a decade earlier hold court in the Palladium Room in what he would later describe as the coach’s “finest hour”.

“We don’t want to bunker down,” Malthouse told the Pies faithful in a veiled swipe at St Kilda who had cancelled their function.

By the time Dale Thomas left Crown Casino he had processed what had happened that afternoon.

“We were as close to losing a grand final as you could come without actually losing one,” Thomas said.

“Mick gave a great speech saying this isn’t round two, it’s halftime and there was a sense that we’d dodged a massive bullet.”

The function made the most sense to Ball who knew it was a good for him to be distracted for a few hours in the company of teammates and family.

“The alternative would have been to go home and think about what happened too much, have individuals think about things they could have done better,” Ball said.

“The fact we were able to go back to the club to do recovery and put it to bed by Sunday, I think that was advantageous.”

Brendon Goddard was thinking too much. His mind was racing all night about what might have been and it kept coming up with the same outcome.

“They were cooked. Another 10 minutes we win, another 30 seconds we win.”

HEARTBREAK AND HAMMYS

LEON Davis was on his way back from Shepparton when he saw his coach’s name flashed up on his phone.

He’d been dreading the call.

It was the Thursday before the Grand Final replay and he’d taken the opportunity to visit his daughter on the players’ day off.

The pair had a great relationship so as soon as Malthouse told him he was being dropped, Davis’ instinct was to put the coach’s mind at ease.

“I understood it, I didn’t really do nearly enough in the drawn game to warrant a spot the next week,” Davis said.

“I told him, ‘Look I understand it, I’ll come to training and I’ll be upbeat’. Being at the club for as many years as I was, I was pretty well known around the boys.

“I got on well with all the boys so the last thing I wanted to do was let them see me shitty and pissed off about not getting a game. I would get to training, put in the work and be my usual self which is to joke around and be happy.”

Davis was able to quickly put his axing into perspective because compared to what he’d had to deal with during his life and what his family had been through as first nation people, missing a game of football didn’t register.

“I have always been one to know that football isn’t everything and there is life outside of footy,” he said.

Malthouse had decided to go with Tyson Goldsack, who would provide more defensive cover, while his desire to pick Simon Prestigiacomo was again thwarted by the man himself.

“I thought with the extra week he’d be over it but he just said: ‘I’m not ready. I’ll let you down’.”

While the dropping of Davis had weighed on his mind for most of the week, the Pies coach was comforted by the fact he had a sense that St Kilda had a lot more worries than he did.

A quote from Lyon in the media had pricked Malthouse’s interest.

“Ross Lyon is a very cagey coach. It’s a bit like China watch, you listen to what they say and you try to interpret it,” Malthouse said.

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“There was an interview with him where he said, ‘This game could be played on Sunday, the AFL have got full rights to change the date and make it on Sunday if they need to’.

“I thought that’s the China watch, that is enough for me to know that they’re sore.”

He was on the money with the Saints, forced to recall some of their VFL players to make up numbers at training. Ruckman Michael Gardiner was definitely out with a hamstring injury but there were plenty of others who were secretly hiding issues, including Justin Koschitzke, Clint Jones and Steven Baker.

Dal Santo was oblivious to the extent of the problem, he knew he felt better and was convinced the replay was going to play into St Kilda‘s hands.

“I honestly thought walking off the ground we were a better chance to win the replay than we probably were the first one,” he said.

“We were a mature group, we have been through this before, we were mentally tough, been through a lot together, ups and downs and I thought the Pies had their chance in that first one and missed it.

“I thought, ‘Yep, this is our fairytale story, we’ve waited since ‘66 to win it and we’re going to get the job done in an unusual circumstance’.”

THE SMOTHER THAT SHOOK A CITY

IT was deja vu. Collingwood was going to score the opening goal of the Grand Final inside the opening 30 seconds again.

Pendlebury had found Travis Cloke alone in the goalsquare but as he was walking back to take the easy shot there was a flurry of activity back at centre half-forward.

A free-kick had been awarded to St Kilda’s tagger Jones after an altercation with Swan.

“I hit him in the face and they saw it,” Swan said.

“They took the ball off Travy and for a split second I was like, ‘F--k if we lose by a kick here they’re going to run me out of Collingwood’.”

He didn’t have to worry for too long. Four minutes later the Pies had the opening goal and again like a week earlier it came from an unlikely source.

Goldsack had just come on the ground and ran straight into the forward line to receive a pass from Cloke. He went back and slotted the goal, which brought a smile to the face of Davis sitting in the stands.

The Magpies had hit the ground running again but they were only two goals up when St Kilda executed a tactical move they’d worked on since the draw.

Lyon figured the Saints needed to find a way to score more so a plan to break through Collingwood,s team defence was devised.

They needed to get out the back of them more so instead of the high half-forwards like Leigh Montagna playing as an extra midfielder, they were to try to get forward of the ball more.

With five minutes to go in the first term, Montagna found space at half-forward and sent a long handball to Adam Schneider.

He quickly executed a right-foot chip to Riewoldt who’d charged forward and was alone at the top of the goalsquare.

It was exactly how they’d drawn it up on the whiteboard during the week.

Except they didn’t have Heath Shaw executing the perfect smother.

The Pies defender had come from five metres behind and just as Riewoldt was releasing the ball to go onto his boot on the goal line, Shaw managed to knock it away.

A sense of deflation spread through the Saints and even though it was still early in the game, Goddard had serious concerns.

“Not long into it I got a sense that we were a bit off mentally,” he said.

“Just making slow decisions, being maybe only half-a-second off.”

At halftime the margin was similar to the previous week – this time 27 points – but the rooms were completely different.

Collingwood’s nervousness from the first Grand Final wasn’t there while the Saints belief – which had launched that extraordinary comeback – was trying to be manufactured again, but sadly everyone in the room sensed the well was dry.

“Mentally everyone was shot,” Goddard said.

“If we hadn’t lost in ‘09 I think we would have been in with a better shot in the replay.

“It felt like we had climbed the mountain again and then to have to come back and do it again the next week, it was too much.

Malthouse wasn’t letting up and made a move at halftime which he said summed up what was a special group of players.

“I gave my halftime speech and then just before they ran down the race I got hit by a brick,” he said.

“I called Swanny back from the race and I said ‘I want you to tag Goddard, I‘ll let you know when to drop it but I want you to tag Goddard because I didn’t want him back in the game’.”

Goddard was definitely the one giving the Saints a pulse with 19 possessions, but Swan was many things; the Pies midfield general, a prolific ball winner who had been favourite for the Brownlow Medal . . . but a tagger?

“He said ‘Yeah, sure boss’. Swanny just listens to what I ask and tell him,” Malthouse said.

“Then I said: ‘Listen I know one thing that will happen, if you’ve got him and you can get forward on him he won’t pick you up’.”

Six minutes into the third quarter, the man then known as Harry O‘Brien bombed it deep into Collingwood’s forward line where a large pack contested.

The ball fell to the front where Swan was waiting. He calmly took three steps forward and drilled the goal. It gave his side a 46-point lead.

Game over.

In the end it was 56 points, which was Collingwood’s greatest winning margin of its 15 premiership victories.

Pendlebury won the Norm Smith Medal with 29 disposals and 11 tackles but there were heroes everywhere.

Thomas had been enormous again with 27 touches and a goal, while the only teenager on the ground, Steele Sidebottom, kicked two goals – as did Sharrod Wellingham, Chris Dawes, Brent Macaffer and Alan Didak.

Young key defenders Nathan Brown and Ben Reid had kept Riewoldt and Koschitzke to one goal between them, while Ball had enjoyed his afternoon a lot better than a week earlier, with 25 quality touches.

McGuire was in tears in the stands, while Davis was one of the first out on the ground to celebrate – although he’d made a significant decision about how he’d do it.

“I didn’t want to touch the premiership cup. I wanted to win one the next year,” Davis said.

“It’s something I did personally that not many people know about. Not once did I touch the premiership cup.”

THE CATALYST FOR CHANGE

MARK Evans had been at both grand finals as an interested observer in his role as Hawthorn’s football manager.

He didn’t expect that five-and-a-half years later he would be the man who would kill off the Grand Final draw.

Despite the controversy surrounding the Collingwood-St Kilda result, there was no directive to address the issue of the draw, which had only happened three times in the league’s history – 1948, 1977 and 2010.

And it almost didn’t happen with Evans, who moved over to the AFL as football operations boss in 2013, recalling the draw debate was a by-product of a discussion with clubs about a number of issues.

“It came out of consultation with the clubs when we were talking about the trade period and the draft, the question was asked about what would happen if there is a draw,” Evans recalls.

“We were talking about a whole lot of stuff and in the end I just put it up – why don’t we conclude it on the day?

“I said it had nothing to do with money and more about how exciting it would be to have a draw and then go to extra time.”

Evans also pointed out how none of the Grand Final replays had been good games, with the physical and mental toll of the first game usually impacting on the contest seven days later.

“With the professionalism of all the things the AFL did we concluded it just made more sense and was a better climax to the season.”

Evans prepared a report for the AFL Commission, who signed off on it with chairman Mike Fitzpatrick announcing the change in April, 2016.

■ PART ONE: The disrespect that fired the Saints

■ PART TWO: The plays that shaped AFL history

Under the new rules, teams were to play two five-minute halves each way, plus time on, to decide a winner.

If the scores were still tied at the end of the second period, the siren wouldn’t ring until the next score, which would decide the flag.

Evans has been asked numerous times how he will feel when there is a draw again on the last Saturday in September.

“I just say it will go down as the most epic Grand Final in the history of the game.”

(Additional references used - The Final Draw documentary, Triple M and Fox Footy podcasts)