"I’ve been through them all. They definitely take a toll on your motivation, and your ability to prepare properly. As an athlete, you just have to get back to the things you can control." Only once, in the turbulence of 2011, did his resolve waver. "Mentally, that was a really hard year," he says. "That was the only year I felt I didn’t get the best out of myself. I think that year sticks in people’s minds." Otherwise, he has met Kipling’s imposters stoically. In the giddy times, he has kept his feet planted. In the dark days, he has kept his head up."I take great pride that I’ve been pretty consistent for my whole career," he says. Here is the nub. From year to year, you could set your watch by Riewoldt’s stats: 16-odd disposals a game, eight marks, better than two goals. It is a deceptively exceptional feat.

"We don’t give enough credit to consistency," says Grant Thomas, his first coach. "I put it down to this: he cares. He always comes to play. Some guys wait to see what the game’s going to give them. The best are relentless in their approach to perfection. He’s the leader of that pack." Riewoldt makes his impact by the sort of running that Thomas says he would tell aspiring forwards to study, more than his marking and kicking, the ceaseless but never pointless running that in the game’s jargon "blows up" opponents. "For me, it’s about knowing what I need to do to play well," Riewoldt says. "It’s about work rate. I’m not a Jonathan Brown, Tom Hawkins, Trav Cloke type of forward. I know I need to run and work to get the ball. It’s that simple for me." Perversely, that game-day gut-bust running is now his training, too. When young, Riewoldt trained slavishly.

"In pre-season, Nick would do 400 metres in phenomenal time, then back it up five or six times in a row," says Jones. "He’d look spent, but then he’d go again." But the game has exacted its pound of flesh. Now Riewoldt does not run at all before Christmas, and between matches trains minimally. "You get the majority of your fitness from games," he says. "If you work hard during games, that’s the fitness top-up you need. You spend the rest of the week recovering." Thomas says Riewoldt grasped from an early age that professional football exposed a man’s character.

"It’s out there for everyone to see," he says. "Fans know Nick Riewoldt’s personality by the way he plays." Several hallmarks identify that personality. One is meticulous attention to detail. Another is self-conviction. "He’s the player who doesn’t want to come off the ground when the contest’s in the balance," said Scott Watters, his coach now. Just last week, they joked about the toll this took on runners. A third is a form of courage perhaps matched only by his mother if she can still bear to watch.

Thomas calls it "unnerving". The last is leadership, so vital in the fragile environment of a football club. Almost since the day he arrived at the club, Riewoldt has had to front it, lead it and personify it. "It’s never been a burden," he says. "I’ve thrived on it. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed it. It’s been great for my personal development, for keeping standards high. I’ve grown into it." He accepts that not everyone can be driven like him. "At a footy club, you’ve got 40 guys who are all very good at the same thing, but come from totally different backgrounds, have totally different beliefs," he says. "As you get older and more mature, you realise that. Once you understand the person and their story, you can help."

He admits that sometimes, he would like to pick up one or two by the scruff of their necks. He suspects others felt the same way about him once. If you were to plot St Kilda in the Riewoldt era on a graph, the club would curve up and down, but he would be the high-range, straight-line constant. If you were to represent it as a document, it would be a palimpsest, on which two premierships would be discernible, tragically erased. It does itch. "People look at you differently if you’ve played in a premiership," Riewoldt says. "If it doesn’t happen, it will annoy me. We’ve been as close as anyone else in the history of the game has gone without winning one. We were very close to back-to-back, and we’ve got none.

"But I saw all the work that went in in ’09 and ’10. I know how well drilled we were. I know the effort guys put in on game day. I’m comfortable with that. We didn’t get the result, but we gave ourselves every opportunity, and from that point of view, I’ll have no regrets. There’s nothing we could have done differently. There was nothing about which you’d say, I wish we could do that again." Besides, says Riewoldt, he knows of many premiership players whose lives later fell to pieces. "Playing in a premiership is not the secret to a long, happy life post-football," he says. "Maybe only someone who hasn’t played in a premiership would say that!" Football’s natural effluxion ensued, too quickly. Ross Lyon left, a gaping hole in the list showed up, a rebuild was announced, and now the Saints are back where Riewoldt began.

Brendon Goddard’s departure seemed to portend the end of the era. Riewoldt demurs, saying that to him, it was about the loss of a mate, his groomsman. He offered Goddard his ear, but no other advice. "As captain of the footy club, I wanted him to stay," he says. "As a mate, I wanted what was best for him." Once, he was in those boots himself, in 2009, when newly formed Gold Coast came knocking. "We were 12 games in, and undefeated, trying to win a premiership," Riewoldt says. "I didn’t want the distraction."

Within two weeks, he had signed a new deal with St Kilda. Briefly, he muses on what he might have done if he had known how that premiership would vanish before his eyes, then declares himself satisfied to be a one-club player. "And I’m 30 now," he says. "No one wants a 30-year-old." Watters sees in the mature Riewoldt a proud professional still, but also a captain who shares himself with everyone, and a man who has actively pursued interests away from football. "He’s a globally interested person," say Watters. "Footy’s part of his life, it’s not all of his life." Riewoldt is content with who he has become. He read Robert Murphy’s recent musings on the closing of his premiership window at the Bulldogs.

He empathised with Murphy about the missed opportunities – it was the Saints who snuffed out Murphy’s dream twice, in successive preliminary finals, only to have their own dreams dashed the next week – but parted from him in one crucial respect. "I haven’t given up the dream," he says. "We’re doing the right thing at the moment, getting some games into young guys. It can happen really quickly. You don’t know who you’ll recruit. You don’t know which kid’s going to bob up and out of the blue become an absolute star. Hopefully, I’ll still be around when we contend again." Over dinner last week, Thomas saw the Riewoldt flame, still burning bright. "Nick hasn’t wavered at all," he said. "If anything, he’s willing his teammates to greater efforts. He’s saying, not on my watch are we going to capitulate. While there’s a pulse, he’ll give it everything." In his second season, Riewoldt played a lone three-goal hand in a 99-point defeat by reigning premier Essendon, and Thomas held him up as an example to older teammates.