As we sat in traffic as thick as treacle on a cold night, creeping north across the Maroochy River bridge duplication towards junior footy at Noosa, there was another duplication going on.

Although the Under-10 Blue in the back seat seemed utterly relaxed – boots slick and socks hitched high, debating the benefits of various super powers with his younger sister – I couldn’t help but feel anxious for him that we might be late.

It was all coming back to me.

For this was a common theme when I was the young footballer in his shoes, not that they looked anything like the black, patent-leather style Nike Mercurials with a baby blue swooshes he was wearing.

They were more of a dusty, well-loved pair I scored off my forward-flank friend Mark Ryan when he grew out of them, but that’s neither here nor there.

Perhaps Hank gets his deep powers of relaxation off his grandfather.

He was and still is a man who never got terribly wound up about most things – punctuality for our weekend sporting pursuits included.

The haunting sound of the siren as we reached the man in the white coat at the front gates always had me frantically scanning the landscape for clues.

Was that for three-quarter time in the 10s or the start of the 12s?

A soothing sign would have been to spot Ryano engaged in a pre-game warm-up of kicking the dust and drinking a can of Big Sars, or the half-back line similarly psyching themselves for the important task ahead by chasing a lizard up a paper bark tree.

What you didn’t want to see from the window of the car, through which the waft of warm pies from the kiosk embraced by the Nordic freshness of the Stimorol gum being casually chewed by Dad, was your team-mates taking their positions on the field.

This was a sight common enough to have planted the seed for nightmares that make occasional visits to this day.

I’ve been miraculously plucked from oblivion to play in an AFL grand final, but arrive late and am so flustered that it takes me the whole game to tie my boot laces.

I never take the field and nobody even notices.

It was worse when new football frontiers were opened in the mid to late 1970s, such as Paradise Point where the sand from emerging canal estates blew cold and dry across a grassless paddock… if you ever got there.

Dad always knew a short cut. Somebody from his work would have told him the best way to “beat the lights”.

Inevitably these short cuts would involve stopping at a Golden Fleece service station to ask for directions and the chance to pick up another packet of Stimorol and a nonchalant $2 dollars worth of Standard while we were there because we no doubt would have been riding the Volksy’s reserve tank all the way from Coolangatta.

We were never the first ones at the game.

There were only a few fleeting seconds at best to dash into the rooms, have your jersey flung at you, check the chalk board for your position and gallop onto the oval.

There’s a saying in sport that there’s nothing like good preparation. Well, this was nothing like it. Nothing like it is today, anyway.

We were fortunate in a way that warming up was not in vogue back then.

The belief that it would make you too tired for the game was a philosophy which fitted our schedule.

There was always time for encouragement, however, as you bolted across the carpark.

“Have a bounce if you’re clear.”

“Throw yourself in and you’ll get plenty of frees.”

“Kick long with the breeze.”

Friendly fragments of advice punted in my direction and caught by my conscience – still as vivid today as the crushed RC Cola cans and white Alpine cigarette butts with lipstick on them that littered my path to the sheds.

I’m lost in these thoughts on the highway.

“Go,” my wife says, jolting me back to the present. The cars are moving again.

By the time we pass the Mudjimba line, the traffic is flowing freely.

I look at my watch and we’re making good time. I could now relax, like everybody else in the car was the whole time.

It was good to be back with them.

To be continued...