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The 1991 AFL grand final at Waverley was responsible for four individual player records – all set by the one man.
Hawthorn skipper Michael Tuck played his 39th final, his 11th grand final and won his seventh premiership, achievements that have never been matched.
It was also his final game which saw him bow out having played an all-time record 426 games.
For many years following Tuck’s retirement it was considered that his benchmark would stand for all-time.
Last Friday night, 25 years after Tuck set the bar, his mark was equalled when North Melbourne’s Brent Harvey took to Etihad Stadium.
On Saturday night at the same venue Harvey will claim the record as his own.
In the lead-up to his impending milestone he has suggested that he still has possibly two seasons left in him so he may well take the record considerably north of 450 games.
Whenever the curtain falls it will be a remarkable achievement.
As of last weekend a total of 12,467 men have played VFL/AFL football. To sit at the top of the tree is quite some honour.
Tuck’s record took a quarter of a century to eclipse. Harvey’s may take considerably longer.
What Harvey has done however is largely debunk a myth although, despite his achievement, many still hold the myth to be true.
It centres on the modern player and the number of games they will play.
I have lost count of the number of times that I have heard people comment on the fact that the way the modern game is played will result in greatly reduced player longevity.
They continually cite the pace of the game and the increased travel requirements as planks in their argument.
The facts however paint a very different picture.
While Harvey is one out of the bag, in recent times there has been no real dilution with respect to the length of player’s careers.
One need only look at the top-15 players of all-time to prove that point.
Aside from Harvey, Dustin Fletcher (4th on 400) and Adam Goodes (8th on 372) both retired last season while Matthew Pavlich will move to equal 14th all-time, alongside Doug Hawkins, when he plays his 350th match on Sunday.
Last season two players brought up their 300th appearance – Corey Enright and Nick Del Santo – and both are still going around this season.
This year has seen a significant swelling of the 300 club.
Nick Riewoldt reached the milestone in Round 2, Shaun Burgoyne in Round 5 and Drew Petrie in Round 7.
Over the past two weeks we have seen Scott Thompson and Sam Mitchell notch up their 300th game and Jimmy Bartel will do it this weekend.
Bartel will be the 77th player to achieve the feat. That means eight men, who represent 10.4 per cent of the 300-game club, have reached that milestone in the past 12 month and 26.7 per cent of the all-time top-15 have been on the field in the past year.
Many of those eight who played their 300th game in the past year will go around next season, and some like Del Santo at 32, potentially for several more seasons taking each into the top-30.
While travel for the likes of the Western Australian teams, which have significant road trips every fortnight, may shave some time off careers the anecdotal evidence has shown the impact to be minimal.
Since entering the national competition the West Coast Eagles have seen 15 players in their 30-season history reach 200 games.
Compare that with Melbourne, the oldest professional club of any football code in the world.
In its 159th season it has had 25 200-game players, just ten more than the Eagles and 16 ahead of Adelaide which is in its 26th season.
To date, Essendon has had 27 200-game players and Richmond and Footscray/Western Bulldogs both 25.
So, as we all congratulate and herald Brent Harvey’s incredible journey this weekend, it is time also to debunk the myth that into the future players’ careers will be greatly shortened.