My son David is about to head interstate for work. He may not be back for some time. He's excited. I am for him, too. But also a little sad.
He's 24 and we've been going to Essendon games regularly for years. My daughter Andrea has been a passionate Bomber since she was a little girl. She's 30 now, but wasn't even five when the Bombers last won a premiership.
There's nothing extraordinary about that of course, there are far longer premiership droughts than Essendon's. But these days as a Bomber fan, it's not about flags. It's about even just being able to share the occasional moment of joy with the people you love.
Because when you're a dyed-in-the-wool supporter sharing a club with loved ones, great friends, or the same familiar faces gathered around a television, it's those shared moments, the journeys to and from games, the shared discomforts you suffer for the joy, that stick in your memory as much as the actual results.
Whenever I think of my late brother and father, the picture seared in my head is from grand final day 1993, when the "Baby Bombers" famously beat Carlton. I was covering the game and out on the ground with other media as the Dons ran their lap of honour. I looked over and saw Steve and Dad embracing and waving madly to me, both beaming.
Steve died just a year-and-a-half later, at 36. Dad died more than 20 years ago now. That mental image remains some sort of comfort to me, all tied up with a lifetime of a mutual love of each other and the game we'd all grown up with, had passed on to us, and would pass on to our kids.
I talked with my own kids about it as we watched Carlton win that thriller against Geelong last week. We were watching together earlier this season when Hawthorn got up over the Cats on Easter Monday and the roar was that loud the TV cameras actually shook.
When was the last time we were all able to share in a similar explosion of joy, relief and exhilaration, we all asked simultaneously? We reckon it was the Dreamtime Game back in 2023, when Sam Durham's mark and last-minute goal saw Essendon pip Richmond by one point in a roller-coaster of a game. That was now more than three years ago.
Three years in which our little family has watched a handful of grinding, dour wins, but far more frequently routine opposition victories where the gap in class was always going to tell, or more recently, those spectacularly insipid Essendon performances where the lack of effort is palpable within minutes and the result a foregone conclusion.
It goes without saying one victory from the past 24 games is bottom-of-the-barrel stuff for this once-proud and successful football club. But it's not just the defeats per se. The absence of hope has been the most crushing.
I noticed it particularly at Essendon's last two home games, at Marvel Stadium against Brisbane, then against Fremantle at the MCG. It wasn't just about the poor crowds, the latter the lowest home crowd Essendon has had at the MCG for 33 years. It was about how passive, how resigned the whole fan base seemed, chatting among themselves, scrolling their phones, even giggling at their own team's countless errors.
If Essendon's administrators, board members and countless wealthy "movers and shakers" had been sitting out with us plebs, this is what should have alarmed them every bit as much as the mounting loss tally. Because I'm not sure it's even all just about that.
Essendon's support base has been incredible these past miserable couple of decades, sticking fat through the hasty demise of that super side of 2000, the slide into entrenched mediocrity, the various failed "new eras", the supplements scandal, of course, and, to be frank, the absolute shitshow into which it has all descended in the decade since.
But the absence of hope is the real killer. And in Essendon fans' case, that's as much about the realisation that too many people with vested interests dictate the club's direction.
Over the years, if it hasn't just been the coterie groups, it's been officials or board members or a revolving door of football department staff more preoccupied with building their own CVs or running business interests on the side than actually caring about the fortunes of their club.
Now there's plenty of voices from outside out for their piece, too, like vultures hovering over a carcass. The saturation media is no great surprise. Essendon means clicks. They were being delivered in off-season specials over summer, and now we're in-season, a coach has been sacked and a prodigal son may return, it's all ramped up to at-times practically rolling coverage.
Given that insatiable appetite and the erosion of hope among the support base, I get why the "James Hird return" narrative has become so irresistible to so many supporters as well as media types. It's football romance on a "Wuthering Heights" scale, it's fantasy like "Camelot".
And Essendon as a club, even at its most successful, has been more susceptible than most to the pull of the heroic figure. Dick Reynolds was playing that role 80 years ago. Few heroes stood taller than John Coleman.
Kevin Sheedy did it from the coaches box. And of a long line of stars who grew under his watch, perhaps none sparkled as brightly as Hird, a powerful name in Essendon history even before he'd played a game, seemingly inseparable from the club by the time he retired, and now powered again by the lust for personal redemption from AFL football's greatest scandal.
And yet I'd argue that even none of these names are on their own more powerful than the collective of men, women and children over more than 150 years who have shared the experience of supporting the red-and-black.
Because none of their deeds would mean anything without the hundreds of thousands who cheer them on.
It's they who fill the grandstands and turn on the TVs. It's those numbers who bring the sponsors and the broadcast dollars. It's they who pass on that sort of devotion from generation to generation. Their loyalty has been incredible, but I'm not sure it has ever been tested quite like this.
What they've seen way too much of, particularly over the last decade, has been supposedly senior players pretty satisfied simply with being AFL players, talking endlessly about learning from setbacks and raising standards, but then seldom actually applying those words to their own performance when it counts.
And even more gallingly, they've seen too many people associated with the club pushing their own barrows dressed up as the best interests of the club, be those barrows about keeping this person in a job or that person out of one, about mutual back-scratching, and about petty politicking.
It's grubby and it's self-serving and more and more Essendon fans are seeing it all for what it is, and are finally questioning why they care so much about a club which, frankly, doesn't give much of a toss about them.
Essendon faces a massive decision now, one which will shape not just the next season or two, but perhaps the next decade. But whatever path it chooses, whether it's the already mythologised "Hird return", or an experienced coach like John Longmire, or a first-timer, those people making that call would do well to remember something.
This isn't Dick Reynolds' club. It isn't John Coleman's club. It isn't Kevin Sheedy's club. And it isn't James Hird's club. It's all of ours, too.
It belongs to the generations of families who have invested their time, money, emotion and hope in it. The parents who passed it on to their children. The siblings who shared it. The supporters who kept turning up long after the joy became scarce.
Essendon has become an unsuccessful football club. But even worse, at times it has felt like a self-interested football club. Its supporters deserve better than that. So do their kids.
David is about to head interstate. Just maybe by the time he comes home again, whenever that is, we'll finally have another one of those moments worth remembering.
You can read more of Rohan Connolly's work at FOOTYOLOGY.