At 36, Jacinta is playing competitive sport for the first time in her life. Well, almost the first. As a teenager she idolised the Brisbane Bullets, and asked to take up basketball. Driven along to tryouts, she was told that the uniform for girls was not shorts, but bloomers. Bloomers, like the underwear she wore under her skirt to school netball. She asked if she could wear shorts like the boys, but was told no. A chubby kid, she was embarrassed, and decided basketball wasn’t for her after all.

She’d never much followed sport after that, especially AFL football. She felt, as Anne Myers powerfully portrays in her prologue to the Women’s Footy Almanac, that footy constituted a “microcosm of patriarchy at its worst... a hyper-masculinised environment that fosters a distorted sense of entitlement and privilege among young men”. She knew the faces and the names, men who “behave badly”, and disrespect women, but are “rewarded with media contracts and pats on the back”. As a feminist, the stakes of following Australian rules football were too intense to bear.

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But, as with Myers, and so many other women, things changed with the introduction of AFLW. For the first time, following AFL footy didn’t mean compromising her values. At last – visibly at least – there were women to idolise, people like Susan Alberti, or Moana Hope (featured on Australian Story on the eve of the inaugural women’s national league). Alberti, who wouldn’t take no from the AFL executive for an answer and propped up the women’s league of her own financial accord, or Hope, “heart and tatts on her sleeve, and a kick to match”. Women who inspired, with “determination, toughness, and a humility and gentleness of soul”.

The rest, as with season one of AFLW, is history. Today, Jacinta is one of 463,364 women playing some form of Australian rules football, after an explosion in the number of dedicated women’s teams “way beyond” the AFL’s own expectations. The number of women’s teams is now 1,690 nationally, a huge 76% increase on last year. Let that sink in: a 76% increase. On the back of these unprecedented numbers, women now account for 30% of the total participation numbers in the game, helping drive a 10% increase overall on participation figures in the sport for 2017.

These numbers are not just restricted to the traditional AFL footy heartland of Victoria, either. Almost a quarter of women playing are from Victoria (108,021) but there is significant uptake elsewhere – even in the traditionally rugby league-dominated expanses of Western Sydney. In NSW and the ACT, there was a 78% increase in women playing in registered club football competitions. When the GWS Giants’ success is inevitably questioned again, perhaps one should start by pointing there.

Part of the story of course is the growth in youth competitions, which will finally ensure pathways from grassroots to elite football for women. For example, in NSW and the ACT, the first competition for girls under the age of 12 had 30 teams in its inaugural year. Nonetheless, it would be a mistake to see the boost in overall participation as wholly dictated by “girls” taking up the sport. Anecdotally, AFLW has been a game-changer for women who had written themselves off from participating in sport. And the numbers back this up. The Victorian Amateur Football Association, which started with a base of four ex-VWFL clubs, ended up with five senior divisions and an unofficial “scratch match” division of six teams for clubs with an overflow of numbers.

These numbers tell an important and revealing story. They tell of women too long ostracised from a game they didn’t have a chance to know they loved. Women like Jacinta, or Anne, who turned to music and politics, to anything but sport, and AFL football in particular. For them, sport went hand in hand with misogyny, with disrespect for women: whether this be at the level of sexist uniforms for girls, or protection and reward for men who behave badly at the elite level.

It doesn’t matter how accurate this story is. Those of us who love sport know too well the nuances of the games we love: we know the stories about the St Kilda schoolgirl, but we also know about the involvement of stars like Marcus Bontempelli, Patrick Dangerfield and Shaun Burgoyne in The Line’s violence against women ambassador campaign. We know that sport is not the unambiguous monster that it can seem until you love it enough for those complexities to emerge, to give it the benefit of the doubt it only sometimes deserves.

The joy of so many more girls and women now involved in the game is both their chance to feel what sport brings so many of us and also what their participation does to the sport and its culture from within. After AFLW, Australian rules football will never be the same, and that is an unambiguously good thing.