“An old man’s dream ended, a young man’s vision of the future opened wide,” the American sportswriter Red Smith wrote when 37-year-old Joe Louis was knocked out by Rocky Marciano. “Young men have visions, old men have dreams. But the place for old men to dream is beside the fire.”
It’s tempting to analogise this current Collingwood side, to pension them off, to declare them too old and too slow. When they lost to GWS in the opening game, the Age’s Jake Niall said they were shuffling around like Joe Biden. It’s tempting, when they field 11 players who are 30 or older, when a 35-year-old is knocked senseless in the opening seconds and when they’re run ragged by a comparatively young and superbly conditioned team, to say that the team is out of time.
