Chyloe Kurdas is former All Australian and Victorian representative, and VWFL Premiership captain with Melbourne University. She spent a decade with AFL Victoria building their community and high performance programs in anticipation of the AFLW competition. Chyloe credits being one the first women to play football on the MCG as one best days of her life.
The Royal British Columbia Museum on Vancouver Island is more than 13000kms away from Melbourne's Ikon Park, but as countdown clock ticks closer to the first game of the inaugural AFLW league, some of the exhibits reveal lessons that resonate for all supporters of women's football.
The RBCM's First Nations exhibit sheds a light on the strength of Canada's indigenous people; their fate at the hands of colonists, ensuing governments and their assimilation policies. The strength of their communities and cultures as they carve out a thriving future.
One belief, though, rings loudly to everyone who has fought so hard to establish a women's league in Australia's most powerful sporting code: that everything belongs to those who are not yet born.
From Friday, no newborn baby girl will ever know what it feels like to have an AFL door closed to her.
Instead, girls and women across the country are being encouraged to take up the game, and they are doing so in droves. In 2016, Victoria added almost as many new female teams (100) as they did between 2006 and 2013 (108) - all before an AFLW ball has been bounced.
It's not just the AFL's participation numbers that will benefit from the AFLW competition. Teenage girls are particularly vulnerable to dropping out of sport. It seems the AFL's delivery of an elite women's competition is helping to buck this trend, with teams for teenage girls being established more rapidly than any other age group in its Victorian heartland.
The AFL intends to make sure the new competition is particularly attractive to girls aged 5-12, and providing girls with critical role models is unapologetically part of the AFLW's ethos. The AFL plans for its groundbreaking competition and its athletes to be "spirited, inclusive, progressive, empowered and credible" - a mix sure to attract girls to the game, and more than enough to obtain the approval of their parents.
The AFL has notably been absent on the female elite sporting stage in Australia. Cricket, soccer, netball and basketball have offered regular national or international elite competition for decades with varying player payments. Instead, the AFL chose to invest its energy in growing a grassroots groundswell of participants that would ensure an elite competition was viable when they were ready to take the AFLW leap.
AFLW, promoted as a quality and credible competition integrated into the existing AFL men's club structures complemented by player salaries and primetime television broadcasts, is the last and most necessary piece of the AFL's pathway if it hopes to become the country's No. 1 sporting code for women and men, girls and boys.
The new competition also honours the courageous work of many who evolved the women's game long before the AFL saw its potential. Nicole Graves spent more than 15 years managing the Victorian state team before convincing AFL Victoria it should employ her to establish the first ever youth girls competition. Former Australian wicketkeeper Julia Price transferred her learnings from observing women's cricket growth to build a female football participation and talent pool in Queensland that gifted us Tayla Harris and Katie Brennan. Lisa Hardeman, former VWFL president, continually encouraged young women to take up leadership responsibilities to grow the game off field because "they were the future of the game".
These women would never enjoy the eventual fruits of their labour as players, but their commitment to changing the future was unmistakable.
Little girls in learning the craft in Auskick, those girls in junior football persevering in a sea of boys, young talents like AFL National Under-18 Academy members Courtney Jones and Madison Prespakis, women who've found the courage to take their backyard kicking skills down to their local community club, and those elite players whose names most people don't yet know, will enjoy some kind of rebirth on Friday night, so important is this competition.
This cohort of AFLW women should be encouraged to pinch themselves and soak in what it means to be 'first'. For all of the investment in them and the competition, they have a critical role to play in ensuring that they are not the last.
The aspiration for what this competition will become belongs to them as much as it did to those women who have gone before, but not as much as it does to those who are not yet born.