Stephen Kernahan is an official Carlton legend and the longest-serving club captain in AFL history, who played 251 games for 738 goals, led the Blues to two premierships, and topped their goalkicking no less than 11 times.
Yet the man known universally as "Sticks" often good-naturedly bemoans being remembered more for two other entries on the CV, a very drunken rendition of Tammy Wynette's "Stand By Your Man" captured for posterity on camera after Carlton's 1987 flag, and his post-siren out-of-bounds against Essendon in 1993 when even a point would have won his team the game.
Sticks, we apologise in advance for bringing it up again, Round 2 of the AFL season being the 31st anniversary of the latter.
But in doing so, perhaps we can also do justice to what was a wonderful and eventful game of football, played between two emerging teams who'd end up meeting four times that season, the last clash on grand final day.
Among other notable things this hot Saturday afternoon was the senior debut for Essendon of a gangly red-headed 17-year-old called Dustin Fletcher. He played in the ruck this afternoon but would go on to play on Kernahan in a grand final just a few months later. Oh, and retire 23 seasons later in 2015 having played 400 games.
Another promising Essendon youngster called James Hird would kick three goals in just his sixth AFL game, Gavin Wanganeen, who'd go on to win the Brownlow Medal that same year, starred, while a couple of young Carlton tyros, Ang Christou and Anthony Koutoufides, were playing their seventh and eighth games respectively.
The older Carlton heads drove the Blues though, Kernahan, who kicked five goals, and his great mate Greg "Diesel" Williams, who climbed out of his sick bed suffering gastroenteritis to rack up 38 disposals and a couple of goals.
A free-scoring, super-fast classic yielded 39 goals. Carlton finally appeared to have broken Essendon's resistance when it led by 17 points 22 minutes into the final term. But goals to Hird, Kieran Sporn, Peter Cransberg and an injured Mark Harvey, who'd returned to the field, amazingly had Essendon up by seven points.
Jon Dorotich for the Blues pulled it back to six points. Enter Kernahan, who should have ended up the hero.
His fifth goal of the afternoon from a strong mark 40 metres out levelled the scores again. Two minutes later, at the 31-minute mark, the siren about to sound, Kernahan marked in front of Anthony Daniher, just 35 metres out this time, and 15 metres in from the boundary line.
With 19.2 metres from point post to point post offering the winning point, a Carlton win now seemed inevitable. But it wasn't. Kernahan takes up the story.
"The siren went, and I think that threw me. But I went back and I just tried to steer it through and I missed by a long way," he told "The Weekend Preview" in 2018.
Kernahan's "helicopter" missed everything to the right. The scenes and the noise at the MCG were chaotic.
So, too, across town at Victoria Park, where myself and a dozen or so media colleagues crammed into a tiny press box, had just witnessed Collingwood beat Geelong, Peter Daicos booting eight goals for the Pies, and Gary Ablett seven for the Cats.
With the siren sounding the Pies 10-point victors, we all crowded around a single transistor radio attempting to hear the finish to the Blues and Bombers. No internet, remember, and the letter-coded "around the grounds" scores up on the board still had the three-quarter time version.
But such was the bedlam going on at the MCG, even in the commentary boxes, that for at least a minute after Kernahan's kick, none of us could ascertain exactly what had happened. Kernahan sure knew, though.
"Afterwards, I took that really hard," he recalled. "I was as flat as a track, because in my mind those are the things that I was meant to do. When it's time to win a game, that's what you're meant to do. I think all guys in a similar role would say that's what they pride themselves on."
Redemption, however, would not be far away. The following weekend, on Easter Monday, Carlton, playing Hawthorn at Princes Park, was four points down, the siren about to sound, when Kernahan marked 50 metres out.
This time, barely stopping to think, he slammed the ball on his boot, the shot sailed straight through, and Carlton won. "I let my emotions spill out because it had been a hard week. It was redemption in the space of nine days. But no one remembers the Hawthorn game, do they," he chuckled.
Hmm, sounds like the perfect fodder for a toe-tapping country and western classic, Sticks. How about it?
You can read more of Rohan Connolly's work at FOOTYOLOGY