A HIGHWAY OF DEMONS - CHAPTER EIGHT

[Demonland 73,140]

Whispering Jack steps out of the Tardis for a moment to contemplate the start of a new season

A HIGHWAY OF DEMONS by Whispering Jack

CHAPTER EIGHT - TOMORROW

"If today was not a crooked highway,

If tonight was not a crooked trail,

If tomorrow wasn't such a long time,

Then lonesome would mean nothing to you at all."

- Bob Dylan "Tomorrow is a Long Time"

In the Samuel Beckett play, Waiting for Godot, Vladimir and Estragon are waiting in vain for a person named Godot. Both claim he is an acquaintance but we wonder whether they really do know him because it is clear that if they were to see Godot, they would not recognise him. The two occupy themselves with various things "to hold the terrible silence at bay" but still, Godot never comes.

In football terms the terrible silence started on 20 September, 1964, exactly a day after the story of the Highway of Demons began. The sounds of that silence still reverberate to this very day.

In the real world, life went on, there was education, love and marriage, a home, a job and children; the joys of life and confronting the death of loved ones. Kids left home, one by one with the last to due to go next month.

And in a universe of more than ten thousand tomorrows there is always one elusive tomorrow - the one in which I join Vladimir and Estragon and we sit and wait patiently together for one more taste of the sweet magic of September.

The memory of the last taste is fading but the story should be told elsewhere. Now is not the time to discuss the joys of the premiership victory, the thrill of the game, the brilliance of number nine, Brian Dixon on a wing, the strong marking of John Lord wearing the coach's old number four, those moments of despair after Ray Gabelich ran and bounced unhindered into goal, the exhilaration of Neil Crompton's only goal of the season which gave us back the lead, Barry Bourke's last minute game-saving mark in defence, the jubilation of the siren sounding and moments later watching Ronald Dale Barassi dip into his last reserves of energy to lift up the premiership cup on what turned out to be the very last day he would ever wear the red and blue guernsey with the famous number thirty-one on its back. Let's not speak here either of the other five premierships won in the glorious decade that ended that day.

Now is not the time to believe in yesterday - we've obsessed with that thought for far too long. Rather, it's time to talk of the day following that last premiership, the day when the long wait began in earnest, and of the days, the months and the years after that.

The common thread of every one of those days is the fact that each of them started out as a "tomorrow".

One of those early "tomorrows" was the day in December 1964 when we discovered that Barassi was leaving to coach Carlton. We were good enough to win the first eight games of 1965 but then came another dark "tomorrow" with a humiliating defeat at the hands of St. Kilda on Queens Birthday. A month later, the era's stunning postscript was etched in history when the Red Fox,

. It was the club's saddest day. Smith was reinstated a week later but Melbourne was never the same again. The club failed to make the finals for over two decades and the Demons are yet to collect a premiership cup since that fateful day in September, 1964. The number of "tomorrows" has mounted. The long wait continues.

Tomorrow, it all starts again. Early in the morning at Gosch's Paddock in the shadows of the MCG, the campaign for September, 2011 begins with the year's first intraclub practice match. It's a modest start to the season but the times have changed. Now the expectation is for the young Melbourne side led by new captain Brad Green to proceed cautiously but with a purpose along the path of improvement that the team showed last year with the emergence of new heroes wearing 31, 4, 9 and other famous old numbers.

After waiting in silence for almost half a century, Vladimir and Estragon have disappeared and there is a growing belief that tomorrow is no longer such a long, long time away.

TO BE CONTINUED