The ‘Pies that bind
Liam Quinn
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“You know this is insane, right?”
I was flying from Washington, D.C., to Melbourne, Australia, at 5:30 p.m. on Sept. 28. I’d return shortly before midnight on Oct. 1. Almost 22,000 miles and 48 hours in the air, with 30 hours on the ground sandwiched between. To go to a football match.
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Perhaps the flight attendant was right — this was insane. But that’s only part of the story.
The Collingwood Magpies are arguably the biggest team in the Australian Football League. Think the New York Yankees, Notre Dame football, the Dallas Cowboys. Traditional powerhouses synonymous with the sports they play.
My dad and I have always had Collingwood. Even when our relationship was in good or not-so-good health. The ‘Pies were the excuse for a phone call, the easy conversation to fill the silence while avoiding the harder ones.
This year, Collingwood made the Grand Final, Australian football’s version of the Super Bowl. So that meant I had to make it to Melbourne. It was a promise we made with each other — an absurd one, but not one I was willing to break.
All week, I told myself the flights would be fine, maybe I’d get lucky and score a window seat, or even better, a magical, miraculous upgrade to Premium Economy.
So, my heart sank when I boarded for the Los Angeles to Melbourne leg of the journey and saw I had a middle seat. The worst of all possible outcomes. Despite clambering out of my seat into the aisle at various stages to stretch my legs, it felt like I was learning to walk for the first time as I stumbled up the air bridge upon landing in Melbourne.
The only thing worse than the flight was knowing I had to do it all over again the next day.
Combining all that with the emotions I was unsuccessfully grappling with resulted in a disorienting feeling I can’t describe as anything other than pre-jet lag.
Everything was a colorless blur.
We visited my grandmother’s nursing home on the way home from the airport. She was older than I remembered, but of course she was. One thing living overseas has taught me is that time ravages, even as memories remain untouched.
We spent 15 minutes trying to catch up on the seven or eight years that have passed since we last saw each other. My wife? She’s amazing. No, not pregnant yet. Hopefully in the next couple of years. My job? It’s OK. How’s D.C.? I like it.
An hour later, we were at my dad’s place. Not the home I grew up in — he sold that and moved down the beach when he retired. Then there was the train to Melbourne, overflowing with “footy” fans making the same pilgrimage we were.
At this point, I barely knew which way was up. We made it to our seats at about 2 p.m. on Sept. 30, but when I glanced down at my watch, it said the clock was just striking midnight. I hadn’t changed it after landing in Melbourne eight hours earlier, meaning it was still set to D.C. time. I was still set to D.C. time.
But when the two teams came onto the ground, everything jolted into focus. The match itself was an instant classic, to use the cliche. There were 10 lead changes throughout, plus four further times when one team drew even with the other.
In the end, Collingwood won by just 4 points. Two goals in two minutes late in the fourth quarter sealed the deal.
I’ll never forget the look of joy on my father’s face when the final siren sounded and Collingwood’s theme song blared through the stadium speakers. The roar of the crowd was so loud you could barely hear it, with hoarse-voiced cries and cheers filling the air instead. The MCG, Melbourne’s concrete sporting cathedral, shook beneath my feet.
I turned to my dad, and we hugged. Not just the hug of a father and son who hadn’t seen each other for almost two years, who could have lost each other on the eve of a Christmas visit one year earlier when he fell off his mountain bike on an uneven path surrounded by sharp rocks.
It was at that moment the emotions I’d been grappling with suddenly made sense.
This was the death of the relationship we’d spent the past 34 years unsuccessfully trying to perfect. This was no longer the relationship of an adult and a child — somewhere along the way, we became equals. Still father and son, but more understanding of the other than we had ever been. Dad’s sacrifices made more sense to me now that I was building a family of my own. And I hoped my choice to do so almost as far away from him as possible made more sense in his mind.
And with that, I cried. Tears of grief for the relationship we had, happiness for the one that was to come — and for Collingwood.
The most intimate of moments, surrounded by 100,024 screaming spectators.
We’ll always have this day. But the truth is, hours before the final siren sounded, my father and I had already won. We just hadn’t figured it out yet.
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Liam Quinn is deputy managing editor of the Washington Examiner.