Nick Riewoldt took it out on his toothbrush.

Right before he would leave home for every game, the St Kilda champion would have a shower and scrub his teeth with an aggression and an anxiety his wife, Cath, could hear from the other room.

The man who has taken the most marks in AFL/VFL history, would get so wound up before matches he would vomit before almost every one.

Football, he said, transported Riewoldt “to this place of ridiculous intensity”.

“Cath would know it was game day by the way I brushed my teeth,” Riewoldt said.

“She would hear me and say ‘go easy’, you are going to cut your gums. You’ll rip them open.

“Looking back on it all, it’s like I am looking back on a different person, but it’s just who I became on game day.

“My great mate ‘Joey’ (Leigh Montagna) would drive me bloody nuts because he would be laughing and cruising around (pre-game), he was just always so relaxed.

“I wish I could have been that way, but it would have been completely manufactured.

“And then on the field, I was like ‘get-the-ball, get-the-ball, get-the-ball. That is when the engine kicked in. It was crazy, really.”

But that was Riewoldt; a brilliant forward whose unconditional effort, breathless endurance and aerial artistry stamped him as not only one of the greatest forwards of his generation, but also one of the most revered on-field leaders.

And running back with the flight on a Sunday at the SCG, Riewoldt produced one of the most courageous moments the game has seen, leaping dangerously into the great unknown with equal amounts of full force and blind faith.

EVERY INDUCTEE: TEARS, TRIUMPH AND AN ALL-TIME HOF SPEECH

Riewoldt was only 21 at the time, playing in just his 61st AFL game.

With eyes only for a Robert Harvey high ball, Riewoldt launched himself into oncoming traffic and cradled the ball to his chest with his left arm as he tumbled mid-air, thankfully only grazing Stephen Milne’s head with his bent right knee.

Legendary caller Dennis Cometti called it on the spot.

The number one pick’s life flashed before his eyes, fully realising he had narrowly avoided a football car crash in pursuit of the leather Sherrin.

But that was the all-in commitment which defined the Tasmanian champion’s career across 336 matches and 718 goals, netting six Trevor Barker trophies and five All-Australian blazers.

And, in the absence of a flag, that mark was ‘the moment’.

“Watching it back I feel a sense of pride,” Riewoldt said.

“In the absence of the ultimate euphoric moment in terms of a premiership, it is kind of a bit of a badge (of honour).

“That kind of happened early-ish in my career and I think I feel like the respect you gain from something like that fuels you to keep doing it, and even searching out for those moments.

“I had others (marks) that were back with the flight, but they didn’t look as spectacular as that.

“Afterwards, I was on the ground just laying there for three or four seconds checking myself and saying ‘Am I all right?’

“But then I popped up and gave ‘Harvs’ the handball and he kicked the goal and it was the best ‘one-two’ ever from ‘Harvs’.

“As it turns out, I’m lucky it was ‘Milney’ coming the other way and not the ‘G-Train’ (Fraser Gehrig) otherwise it would have been trouble for me.

“But even for ‘Milney’, my knee just missed him, so it’s lucky I didn’t kill him.

“He (Milne) maintains he had the right of way, of course.”

In all, there were 2944 marks at an average of nine a game. But there were dozens or signature grabs amid packs of three or four players, where he either soared above, crashed in from behind, or elegantly floated in from the side.

And on a notepad at home he kept earlier in his career, Riewoldt scribbled down hundreds of times per go that “Nick Riewoldt is the hardest-working player in the game” until he “willed it to be true” in only his fourth season in 2004 when he claimed the Leigh Matthews Trophy as the AFL Players’ most valuable player.

By then, Riewoldt had already built one of the biggest tanks in the game.

And the mental and physical battle always began against his man at the first bounce.

Riewoldt didn’t just break his opponents, he drowned defenders in exhaustion.

And as soon as the game started he would take off with his first blistering 400m run, up-and-back and side-to-side across the oval, just to send a message to his opponent that they were in for a difficult day.

“I would just take off at the start, no matter where the ball was, really,” he said.

“It got me invested in the game straight away and it spelled things out for my opponent just to let them know what today was going to be like.

“And I think that is what I got really good at.

“I knew if I kept going at the ball there was no one who could go with me.

“You feel the fatigue hover over yourself, but you know you have got it in you to go again.

“And that is a really good feeling. That is the feeling I searched for in a game because I knew if I was feeling it, you think ‘what are they feeling? That was the kind of thing that fuelled me.”

Sometimes, in the second half, he would issue a four-word warning which sounded a torpedo alarm in his opponent’s mind, just when they thought they would finally get a rest.

“Here we go, again,” Riewoldt would say, before sprinting off for another 400m.

The rivalries with Harry Taylor, Dale Morris and Craig Bolton, in particular, were headline acts for a decade and a half.

But if the determination and running power is what took him to the ball, it was the sharpness of his hands and an almost telepathic connection with a generation of St Kilda midfielders which elevated him to greatness.

As a gun junior cricketer, Riewoldt’s batting coach would thunder down short balls from mid-pitch length to quicken his hand movements and reaction time as a 16-year-old all-rounder.

And once he turned his attention to Australian Rules, Riewoldt became unstoppable on the lead.

“I always had good hands, but early in my career I felt like I could sprint as hard as I could at the ball carrier and go full extension and know that I was going to mark it,” he said.

And he knew the subtle differences between how each of his midfielders kicked it.

They each read body language, and picked changes of directions on leads before they happened.

Montagna and Hayes would lob the ball out in space, whereas Brendon Goddard would drill him with low-flying bullets, all requiring different approaches, marking techniques and leading patterns, depending on who had it.

“I developed this thing with ‘Harvs’ where he could be running at me and I would just know I could start moving away from him, and as soon as I plant my foot in the ground and come back in the other direction he could just dink it at me,” he said.

“It was almost impossible to stop. That unspoken connection. He knew what I was going to do and I knew as soon I ducked back at the leg, I would get it.

“Same with ‘Aussie’ (Austin) Jones and same with Lenny.

“And I could tell straight away whether they liked the option I was giving them or not. I could tell after 10m.

“If they didn’t kick it, I knew I had to give them something different. A different angle. Different space.

“Playing with the same mids throughout my career was really cool. It was almost kinaesthetic. And it comes from repetition and trust.”

Ultimately, Riewoldt never won the flag he so desperately craved, despite phenomenal seasons in 2009 and 2010, which led to heartbreaking grand final defeats.

By about 2013, he realised a premiership “would never happen”, something he was unable to make peace with until he headed overseas with his family in 2022 for time abroad.

“There was a period probably for a decade where I found it really difficult,” he said.

“Footy is so binary. And when you stay involved in the game you are surrounded by haves and you are a have-not.

“So that took a little bit of time and, family and time overseas has helped perspective. It has softened now, which is nice.

“I feel just a huge sense of gratitude for everything the game gave me, and my family, rather than what is missing.

“So I’m glad I got there in the end.”