Crow Tom Lynch celebrates a goal against the Hawks. Credit:AFL Media/Getty Images

"It was something I asked myself," he said. "The news came through and it was, 'OK, so do I stay now? Am I still going?" That even his senior teammates had told him he deserved to be at a club that would play him helped him shake those thoughts. "I was desperate to play. And I'd committed to it. I definitely asked myself the question, but I knew I was ready to start over again."

Deciding where that would be didn't take long, either. Lynch came home from his holiday a week early, with a handful of clubs lined up to talk with. But at 7am the day after his flight got in, he met then-Crows coach Brenton Sanderson at Southbank. A few hours later he was on a plane to Adelaide; his soon-to-be good friend Josh Jenkins was on the same flight. At the end of the day he called his manager to tell him there was no point talking to any other teams, that he should go ahead and get a deal done.

Lynch isn't sure exactly what appealed to him. He had friends in Adelaide including Patrick Dangerfield and Rory Sloane. And he knew the coach wanted him, which meant a lot. "I think maybe that's what I was looking for, someone who had confidence in me," he said. "I was looking for an opportunity, mostly, to prove myself to the people I played with. I felt like I'd have a fair shot at getting one if I came over here."

He has, even with that little wait. It wasn't an easy opportunity, with the hard-running Lynch challenged to find a place, "my own little niche", in a forward line that now features Eddie Betts and Taylor Walker as well as Jenkins, his regular end-of-season travelling companion to a bunch of US colleges and sports teams. Lynch thinks he might like to get into coaching one day, and likes to gather pieces of advice from anyone over there he can find time to talk to. But back to that search for a spot. "It can be hard to find room in our forward line, but that's been good because I sort of had to take a different path and find a position for myself," he said. "And the other thing is that I've tried to never feel comfortable. If I ever have a quiet game or a bad game, it's something that makes me feel like I could be out the next week. Even now I think that. I want to make sure I don't go in and out of the team again, I want to be helping every week and contributing. I'm enjoying it too much to go back to that."