Both sides finished that epic with long casualties lists, and I mean casualty, not injury. John Platten was hit in the head so often it is impossible to say even now which one gave him concussion, but he was unable to play after quarter-time and to this day remembers nothing about the game. Dipper gave and got, until he could hear the air hissing out of his collapsing lung. Intones Don Scott, a former Hawthorn hard man by then commentating: "It’s not a safe place to be out there."

It was tactical, not incidental. "The rules permitted that if the opposition player was within five metres of the ball, I could bump them down the centre, to the head, and as long as it wasn't an elbow, I could bump them out of the game," Brereton told Wilson.

"I thought that was a loophole in the rules. Even back in the day, I'm quoted as saying that it's not the right way to play football. But it was part of the rules, and so I took advantage of it."

In the grand final, it was Yeates who took the advantage. "What he did, for the era, was totally fair," Brereton said. "I take my hat off to Yeatsey. He didn’t do anything I wouldn’t have done to him." Or hadn’t already done to him, that same year. There was an honour code of a kind. In choreographing Yeates’s grand final square-up, Geelong coach Malcolm Blight had said to him: "Fairly. No fists, no elbows. Fairly."

Tony Wilson was an under-19 player at Hawthorn at the time. He watched the game with his father, Ray, who played for the Hawks in the 1971 grand final, thought by many to be the most brutal of all. Fists, elbows, boots, anything and everyone was fair game.