Coronavirus shutdown has left a hollowness in the life of this AFL fan

Given how a week seems like a month in this sombre and over-eventful new epoch we find ourselves in, a footy season may well be a decade. Foregoing the rituals that underscore the cadence of our lives is one of the hardest things about now. For many, including me, a big loss is Australian rules football.

Watching my team play a fortnight ago in round one brought such joy, such transporting distraction, as that juggernaut of pain and anxiety bore down on us. I’m a Collingwood supporter (loose your arrows here, I’m impervious) and that weekend as I watched all the televised AFL and AFLW I could (and then some NRL) I fully anticipated that it would probably be all I’d see this year.

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Even while relishing Collingwood versus Western Bulldogs, it felt like a guilty pleasure, like perhaps they shouldn’t have been playing at all. For outside the ghost stadium, its empty floodlit stands like something from a scene in The Handmaid’s Tale, the dystopian spectre was finding shape in panic-buying, societal closure and streets of wide-eyed, conspicuously distanced individuals wearing surgical masks. I was conflicted.

Notwithstanding it was definitely to be our year (the Pies have won their last two flags on the zeros of 1990 and 2010; I’ll find omens where I can), I was relieved for the sake of the greater good when the season was iced. Less than two weeks later I can’t believe we even saw round one.

But I still want a footy fix because AFL isn’t just important to me during the season. It is part of the rhythm – the pulse – of my whole year.

The day after the grand final, the group message will always ping: “What now?” It’s an important question because by October and November we are in withdrawal. The soundtrack of cricket merges with hypnotic, silvery cicada-song to mark summer time. The Australian Open compels for all its flamboyance, athleticism and star-studded giddiness ... and signals the start of the real countdown to AFLW and AFL.

Once the season starts so too does the endless fun banter, the tipping comps and associated light-hearted commentary, the constant WhatsApp sledging, the personal betting and the contentions about wagers (in my case, bottles of Clonakilla shiraz – the betting currency of choice with one St Kilda-supporting mate; I’m yet to receive them) carried over from years past.

A Carlton supporting mate explains better: “I’m lost. I spend six months waiting for the season, then count down the weeks and days. Then I build my week around the match – thinking about it, talking about it, reading about it, texting about it. The match determines the shape of my weekend and my mood for the rest and for part of the next week until I start thinking about the next match. Weekends when we have a bye feel hollow.”

That word – hollow – has such broad emotional, societal, resonance now.

I had been re-living on YouTube my favourite golden moments – that astonishing, tone-setting Heath Shaw first quarter smother of Nick Riewoldt’s certain goal in the 2010 premiership replay; the final 10 minutes of the 2011 prelim against Hawthorn or the last quarter of the 2019 Anzac Day match. And there was always the 1990 VFL grand final highlights: the magic of Daicos and the last touch of the match by Darren Millane ... leading inevitably to career highlights of “The Raging Bull from Victoria Park”, hardest of men on-field, imperfect off, archetypically Collingwood, gone in a car smash a year later, now ever-young in black and white memory.

I was lost in nostalgia.

Related: Hawthorn v Geelong: VFL grand final 1989 – retro liveblog

And then I saw the retro liveblog of one of the great VFL grand finals – 1989, Hawthorn versus Geelong. The commentary by Adam Collins played a mind trick. Somehow it made me feel more in the moment than in history. I wanted more.

As it happened my Collingwood son-in-law, Nick, introduced me to a (hardcore Pies) chat group that is replaying each 2010 Collingwood match, almost in real-time, with a combination of commentary – pre-, during and post-game – as well as criticism, banter and witticism, sledges, recollection of the day and whimsy.

Last Friday night, the eve of round two, 2010 (and what would’ve been the same for 2020) the call went out from said son-in-law: “Big game tomorrow lads ... Demons at the ‘G to go 2-0 ... Will record a standard ‘walk to the G’ around midday.”

I was no longer alone as I summonsed so vividly the experience of walking with the throng that afternoon at the beginning of that golden season a decade ago, just as I’d done countless times during so many far bleaker ones. Though none quite so bleak as this. And it reminded me how badly I want to do it again and how much we have foregone already. But for now I’ll take what football I can so I don’t lose touch with the cadence altogether.

This week the Pies play St Kilda. The Saints are strong this year – likely finals contenders. But I’m confident of three on the trot.

• Paul Daley is a Guardian Australia columnist