Darren’s death not the only loss the Millanes faced

SEAN MILLANE is wide across the chest and tells a good yarn. Once, after a haircut, his mother had to catch her breath at the resemblance to his lost brother.

Darren skipped into the big league whereas Sean would settle on a fine footballing career in the VFA and VFL.

Sean is a father who has confronted loss again and again. That’s the difference, of course. He hobbles on wobbly knees, but he’s still here.

He and mum Denise do their best to keep Darren around.

Their most tender memory took place in the most public of places.

After the 1990 grand final siren, John, Sean and Denise rushed to the MCG fence. Sean didn’t know how his brother heard through the din of almost 100,000 people, but Darren rushed over and the family embraced.

“Meet you later on,” Millane said. “We’ll get on it.”

Former Fitzroy player Jamie Cooper turned to art after football. His painting of Millane on the Victoria Park wing swallows visitors at the front door of Denise Millane’s Noble Park home.

media_camera Painting of Darren Millane by Jamie Cooper.

Her house is cluttered with footballing glitters: somewhere, she’s got the pins from Darren’s thumb surgery after the 1990 grand final.

The number 42 jumps out at the Millanes on street signs and in restaurants.

Sean likes to recount the coincidences. For his 147th VFA game, Darren’s AFL career total, Sean threw down his bag at a Victoria Park locker - his brother’s.

An ex-girlfriend of Millane’s has three ornamental ducks on a hall table.

They move without explanation, and she ”knows” it is Darren.

The supernatural is a recurring thread in the Millane remembrance. Five months before Millane’s death, Denise Millane visited a clairvoyant.

“She said to me: “One of your boys is going to have trouble with a car. He is going to be in the wrong place at the wrong time”.

After the funeral, she remembered the conversation. “I thought to myself, this isn’t fair, why didn’t she tell me more, I could have stopped it,” she says.

type_quote_start I have no doubt we would have won in 1992 with him type_quote_end

SEAN Millane got another phone call many years after the first.

“We’re not 100 per cent sure but we think it’s your father,” the police officer said.

Bob Millane had left a note. He was a “lost soul for many years” and beyond the reach of the youngest son who rushed to help whenever his father threatened the worst.

Sean Millane’s proximity to grief has qualified him for unexpected roles.

He has become a “go-to” for others, as has his mother.

“People say: ‘How do you get over it?’”

“Well you don’t, you just learn to live with it... I’m not going to see my brother again. I’m not going to see my father again. I’ve learned that the world turns. It’s not going to stop for me. At times you’d like it to but it doesn’t.”

Instead, Sean Millane recalls happier moments, such as fish and chips in the back of his father’s truck after schoolboy football trainings.

Denise remembers the little loss that hurt deepest – her and Darren’s Saturday morning tradition of washing each other’s cars.

Last year, for Darren’s 50th birthday, a Brighton restaurant lunch included surgeon John Bartlett and some of Darren’s school friends.

Bartlett spoke about Millane’s thumb, Denise explained why she’d given the 1990 grand final ball to Collingwood to display.

The merriment hid the everyday ache of what-if.

media_camera Sean Millane holds a photo of himself with the 1991 Dandenong premiership cup (the year Darren Millane died) and his brother Darren Millane with the Collingwood 1990 premiership cup Picture: Wayne Ludbey

McGuire “knows” that Millane would have been an “absolute star” on The Footy Show.

John Millane identifies in his brother the analytical mind of today’s coaches.

“I think he also would have been smart enough to be that Billy Brownless type of personality that everyone loves,” he says.

Craig Kelly, now a prominent football manager, says his friend had charisma and drew an audience: more importantly, he was growing up.

”He probably would have settled down, got married and had kids,” Kelly says.

Other possibilities still go unanswered.

McGuane upped the training schedule he’d embarked upon with Millane after the 1991 season. Over the following year, he went out with the boys until late, but only sipped water. He won the club’s best and fairest award in 1992 and 1993.

Had Collingwood lost more than a revered player? Millane’s friends and family believe that AFL finals history was probably changed by his death.

“Absolutely, it might have been different,” Matthews now says of Collingwood’s finals’ elimination in 1992.

“We would have smashed it,” says Daicos of the 1992 finals campaign, echoing a lament of many of the 1990 flag-winning players.

“I have no doubt we would have won it with him.”

media_camera Peter Daicos and Millane

The AFL’s Ross Oakley calls Millane’s death a “wake-up call”. Clubs are now held responsible for their players, a small but enduring positive from a tragedy.

“All young fellows have moments in their lives, they all have that bit of a scallywag in them, particularly sportsmen who are required to be strict in their training regimes and so forth, and they sometimes break out,” he says. “It still happens today, unfortunately.”

The Millane’s fixation with the number 42 seems like a lifelong sentence.

Yet there is one place, the Collingwood jumper, where the question of sightings gets muddled.

The number was retired from the Collingwood list after Millane’s death.

The club aired plans to bring back the number, but its approach at the time upset Denise Millane.

The family would like to see a round each year when Collingwood players wear a small 42 on the jumpers, perhaps above their hearts.

As for the official number itself, Denise is clear. She is a grandmother to three, soon to be four, including a little boy nicknamed Jocks.

Why not wait until the next Millane plays for the Magpies?