"One of the best days was when we went in about four weeks after it happened, and he was in this big wheelchair, like a full-framed thing," Marcus said. "We put a footy on a bench in front of him and he sort of picked it up and caught it and went to throw it. It was like, well, that's pretty good isn't it? He'd only just started to sit up when he did that. There were a lot of steps he had to go through but his recovery was pretty rapid, really."

It was also extremely consuming: every day Marcus and his parents would get up, go to the hospital, go home, sleep and get ready to do it all again. Three months passed, before he had really even noticed. As confident as he was that Luke would pull through, it was impossible not to wonder some days how close to living a normal life he would get. Marcus missed a lot of his university classes, and found it hard to really care. He kept playing footy and made it through the season but decided not to go back in 2012. The game didn't matter to him like it always had.

"I just stopped caring," he said. "There was a real disconnect and I was just meandering my way through life. I wasn't pushing to achieve anything and I didn't really know what to do without Luke there. He'd always influenced my decisions, with footy and uni, at the gym - everything I did, really. He was two years older than me and I grew up thinking 'he knows what to do, he'll lead me down the right path.' Not having him around, I sort of had to learn how to make my own decisions."

Not all of them were good choices. Adams still didn't feel like playing footy in 2013, but joined a rugby team hoping to simply have some fun and enjoy himself again. When he hurt a shoulder a few weeks into the season, he was having zero fun and not enjoying himself at all. "It got to a point where it didn't make any sense to me. I thought, 'what am I doing injuring myself when I'm meant to be here for fun?" he said. "I was plodding along, and that wasn't what I wanted. I wanted to be better."

He also knew he was playing the wrong sport. Adams made his way back to football at the end of 2013, signing on with West Perth. He made the senior team, stayed there and started to think he might be good enough to get drafted one day, "if I improved this and worked on that, made a few little adjustments and put a bit more effort into everything". He broke his hand early last year, at what felt like the worst possible time, but was one of the team's best players in his first few weeks back and believed even before AFL clubs began interviewing him that he was good enough to play for one of them. "I trained better, I ate better, I listened more," he said. "I did everything I could think of to become a better player."