The dogs on Main St howl,

’cause they understand/

If I could take one moment into

my hands/

Mister, I ain’t a boy/No, I’m a man/

And I believe in a promised land.

Is there a more optimistic week in the calendar year than the one before the season? As all of our teams sit on top of the AFL ladder, more or less, it just so happens that Bruce Springsteen is in our fair city.

For me, his songs have captured the beauty and nobility that is woven into the struggle of life. Take Factory, for example:

”Factory takes his hearing/

factory gives him life/

it’s the work, the work, the working life.”

As a professional footballer, that speaks to me. The first music I ever considered to be my own was Springsteen’s. Like millions of others, it has been a companion ever since.

My days as a kid were often spent kicking a football up high into the power lines out in front of our family home and trying to catch it on the way back down, commentating the play out loud as it unfolded. On reflection it was more than just kids’ play, it was a meditation of sorts.

When the light faded and the legs were appropriately aching, I’d lie on my bed and listen to those songs and dream. Football dreaming.

This week I fulfilled a lifelong dream and saw my hero sing those songs.

Our inspirations are threaded through everything we do in life – our sport, our kids, our loves. In every league footballer beats the heart of a 10-year-old kid who kicks a ball high and dreams of what will happen next.

With one of my Bulldog heroes going down this week, I’ve been given the enormous honour of leading the boys out on to the park. The thrill is all the greater coming in the one week of the year when we all walk on the sunny side of the street, basking in the autumn sunshine of footballing possibilities.

Predictably, it won’t last for long. Within days half of us will be plunged into darkness on the other side of the street, and spend the next few months criss-crossing each other, hoping to stay on the sunny side as long as we can until only one remains. These lucky bastards will look skywards not to the football gods but as football gods, bathed in a golden glow.

While four sides have already played their first games, the rest of the league’s players had last weekend to themselves. A chance to take one last deep breath before heading into the season.

I know I did, and I’m sure there were a few other players who took stock of their physical and mental health and thought to themselves, ”This is probably as good as I’ll feel for the next six months”.

A football season is a punishing, unrelenting and painful race – not just on the body or the mind, but in your heart. No amount of autumn sunshine can distract you from that reality, especially if you’ve been around a few times before.

I don’t watch a lot of American sport but I did catch the Superbowl, and Marshal Yanda from the Ravens was almost preaching this one line: ”Embrace the grind, embrace the grind.” It captures the life of an AFL athlete during the season too.

A football season has this magnificent duality going on. The rhythm of results and form and injuries and criticism is a roller-coaster that requires each player to be strapped in for his own safety, but it sits in front of a backdrop painted in routine. Repetition after repetition of stretching, training, eating, sleeping, preparing, thinking, praying, warming-up, warming-down, aching, hurting and healing. Day-in, day-out, week-in, week-out.

This routine is perhaps the hardest thing for young players to adjust to and may form part of the picture as to why the Bulldogs’ young team fell away last year. With age and experience, you not only feel able to endure the day-after-day proposition, you also gain strength from each step, each effort, each breath and each bruise.

Because, in your own mind at least, there is a nobility in each tiny effort that sits apart from winning or losing.

Round one is not a grind though – it’s what separates itself from the other 22 rounds. This is a ballistic game that feels more like launching a rocket than a grind, embraced or otherwise. Those weeks will come.

Springsteen says of his own live performance that, ”You are trying to create something that isn’t there, but once you count in 1, 2 … 1, 2, 3, 4, you create a world with the audience”.

Out at Footscray, we’re gathering the pack for our launch against the red-hot Brisbane Lions. When I hear the first siren, I’ll be counting in, ”1, 2 … 1, 2, 3, 4”!

The article originally appeared in The Age.