Jenny and Joe Giansiracusa were leaving Etihad Stadium last weekend when the vastness of their football journey flashed before their eyes.
"There was a little boy sobbing, his Mum and Dad trying to console him, and he was just devastated," Jenny says of a young Western Bulldogs fan, distraught after another loss, pleading for the Sydney theme song to stop. "It reminded us so much of Daniel."
Way back at the beginning, little Daniel Giansiracusa wore a Hawthorn jumper and relentlessly dragged his father into an Altona cul-de-sac of modest brick veneers, in front of the house where his parents still live, a football under a slender arm, a child's fantasies swimming around his head. The gap between the light pole and a nature strip tree was the goals, and he'd commentate every kick, dreaming of where it might take him. "He knew all these stats," Joe says, "and he had dialogue."
Sometimes the neighbours got vocal too. "We'd get a phone call saying he'd knocked another shrub over," Jenny laughs.
Football consumed him then as it still does, and his parents went along for the ride. "He made me sew a flag the size of a table, brown and yellow squares, so big he couldn't lift it," Jenny says. From the very back of the top deck at Waverley he hauled it skyward, father clinging to son and flag lest they both be blown away.
"And they lost," Jenny says, "and he was just devastated."
There will be sadness on Sunday, too, as a greying 32-year-old husband and father of two does the only thing that little boy in a quiet Altona street could imagine - for the last time. Jenny and Joe know their journey will end too, and they give thanks for every step.
Within the space of two generations, their son has added an unforeseen shimmy to the family lineage. Joe Giansiracusa's father left Sicily in 1932 and settled in Balranald aged 17. He and his brothers were market gardeners; sport - even Olympic games and world events - didn't register with them. "They just weren't interested."
Jenny's brothers played local footy for Landsborough in between working the farm, three generations tending Wimmera sheep, cattle and crops. "I was never sporty. My sporting interest started with Daniel in the under-10s."
At least their coming together had a competitive backdrop. At the Ararat trots, a horse owned by a workmate of Jenny's clashed with one Joe had a stake in and both went down. "I gave him a serve for knocking over my horse," Jenny says, "and it went from there."
Eight months later they were engaged, after eight more they married, had Sara and Rachel and then Daniel. Joe's football had peaked at Assumption College, and when his son showed a bit of promise and a lot of enthusiasm he took him down to Williamstown Juniors, got involved as team manager, and infuriated Daniel with his insistence that everyone get a fair go.
"He'd go crook at me all the time because there were eight or nine on the bench and I'd say, 'You're only going to get two quarters today, mate.'" By the under-16s Joe stepped back; he and Jenny have been quiet observers ever since. "We just like watching him play."
Daniel's sisters had no choice but to like watching their little brother too. "Everyone was involved, they were dragged along," Jenny says. The pay-off was Daniel attending their ballroom dancing performances, like it or not.
They all gathered around a radio in the family living room in late 1999 to hear Daniel chosen by the Dogs with pick 32. Two years later Rohan Smith filled his ute and their only son swept out the front door with a distracted "seeya". Smith pulled him up, reminded him he was leaving home. "Go back and give your Mum a hug."
Jenny felt a mother's familiar void, so the Giansiracusas offered to put up young Bulldogs draftees. Adam Cooney lived with them for 18 months, Andrejs Everitt for two years. "We just adopted other footballers to fill the gap."
They've been to every game they could manage, travelled interstate several times a season, and after booking in advance flew to Cairns and Tasmania this year when their son didn't even play. They've keep their counsel as spectators, although sometimes it's tested their equanimity.
"I find it interesting where people must think players' families are," Jenny says. "You're sitting there and they're saying these awful things about your son, they must think we're locked away somewhere."
Jenny becomes emotional revealing the best thing about having an AFL footballer in the family - that it has truly been a journey shared. "He's allowed us to be involved." Joe smiles at snippets of inside information he's known over the years, but never betrayed. The insight has helped make sense of the mad world their son inhabits, where the workaday toil and struggle goes unseen, and brutal assessment is made on two short hours each weekend.
"They've no idea what they go through, and his wife and children," Jenny says of the fans. "It consumes their life. People think it's such a blessed life, they get paid this enormous amount of money to play for two hours a week ..."
Daniel rings Joe after every game, invites his father's critique. Every week Joe asks how he's pulled up, and gets a rote answer: "Same as last week." It's unspoken that the status quo isn't, "Jumping out of my skin Dad, thanks for asking."
The Giansiracusas acknowledge it's not exactly normal for parents to bear witness to the most important chunk of their child's working week, every week, and for it to so influence their own happiness. Joe laughs that they sometimes visited the kindergarten where Rachel taught, and had the occasional treatment when Sara was working as a massage therapist, but agrees that's not the same.
Daniel met Kelly at 17, "right at the start" Jenny says, although Joe reckons they were 19 before he brought her home. They adore their daughter-in-law, their grandchildren Ruby and Otis, but no more than Sara's four girls under six, or their seventh grandchild Rachel is carrying. It touches them that their three children orchestrate regular family dinners, rotating between their houses.
They cherish, too, that Daniel's is a local story, the boy from a western suburb making it big with the club of its people. Joe worked for 35 years at the Bradmill cotton mill, remembers when the company was "flying"; he shakes his head that only the boiler house remains, a lonely remnant in a paddock alongside the Westgate Freeway that will soon spawn a whole new suburb.
Their postman, a rabid Bulldog, used to defer to their status as football parents by hand-delivering their mail. They were out walking recently when the old principal from Altona Meadows Primary School called out, "There's the Gias, how are they all going?" Jenny thinks it's nice, like living in a country town.
He has always just been Daniel to them, although his Mum admits his perennial appearance in "best looking footballer" polls would obviously sit well with any parent. They've watched their boy grow and change - "he was a baby, now he's married, had children, lost grandparents" - all under a fierce spotlight with No.13 on his back.
"It's been beautiful watching him grow, from that timid boy, the first time he was interviewed, how terrified he was," Jenny says. "To watch him become confident, come into his own, it makes you very proud."
A fortnight ago, as Daniel again came on as the Bulldogs' sub, a man behind them in the stands yelled out, "Come on, old man, let's see what you can do." It made Jenny smile to realise, "Oh yeah, OK, he is."
Through all the wins and even more losses, the silent suffering and little triumphs that go unseen, they know their son has matured into a fine man. They know he'll view Sunday's last chapter in the same way that, with maturity, he came to see the toughest days of his crazy job. "Can't do anything about it now, it's over."
ends
