The magic of the AFL’s Gather Round comes from letting adults rediscover their childlike love of footy

It is Thursday afternoon in Adelaide and the Torrens River is reflected in a cloudless sky.

A father and his son stop for a brief respite in the shade. “It’s not bad, hey friend?” The father asks while he gives a bottle of water to the young man, surely no more than 10.

“Better than school,” replies the child, with a radiant smile that suggests euphemity.

Imitation is still at hours away, but civilization has already spilled from the CBD to the banks of the river. On the one hand is Adelaide Oval, it is still a show in its latent state.

On the other hand is what is called Footy Festival. It meets, and for a few days of April, the entire AFL has packed the car and has gone to the road to the capital of South Australia.

And in a matter of minutes, you can feel it. This football festival, which is read in the summary sheet as a glorified advertising fence for the AFL and its many associated companies, is alive.

If you had to play a spot game The Guernsey, you could have scored almost all clubs in an hour. The communities within the community make fast friends: a family of st fans of ST KILDA receives a “carn the Sants” from a stranger of related ideas and ends in conversation for five minutes or more.

People have really come everywhere for this, almost all of them with friends and families in tow.

What a place to be a football boy. Each brand that has heard has established a kick of kicks, handball or marking so that it has a crack, and if it tames its arrival perfectly, its favorite player could appear for a photo and an autograph.

It is difficult to completely appreciate from afar because on television, as in this article, it mostly feels like a regular football, but with a group of people who tell you how different it really is.

But when you are surrounded by football with this appearance, you cannot avoid seeing it with those children’s eyes again.

During these few days, the daily routine of the football season does not seem to apply. The tap has been extinguished in commercial rumors and contract conversations and the indignation made, briefly replaced by everything that can be good about the game.

Nor is it alone at the festival, but in local land around the city and beyond, while fans go into mass to the training sessions and aligned the fences to take a look at their heroes. Because it meets, players stay a little more to sign one more poster, and nobody goes home.

In games, the atmosphere is a bit different from the usual. The bridge of neutral fans in the games probably has something to do with that, and not everything is bad.

Three quarters of the Collingwood-Sydney game, Adelaide’s Hill Oval Fuelve an interpretation of Taylor Swift’s love story, and no matter your feelings about that kind of thing, it sounds spectacular.

That does not mean that the cut and thrust are completely lacking.

In a meat presentation mission, AFL Big Boss Andrew Dillon walks along the bridge to Adelaide Oval for the Opening Game between Adelaide and Geelong. On the way, a fan of the crows addresses him very happy to reprimand him for the brand that is not paid to Izak Rankine in the defeat last week against Gold Coast.

A few hours later, Cats fans fill the trams with their song proclaiming Geelong the best team of all. Leading the choir there is a man in a Guernsey of the Cats who confesses to be really in favor of the west coast. It is that type of weekend.

In the Barossa it is easy to get distracted with the surroundings, especially when both assigned games become explosions of the second half. It meets for adults here, with the AFL and the state government joining strength to put a bus to whip foot fans around the wineries on both sides of the games.

Norwood Oval gets the best lot of the lot, and although you can barely see the other side of the field when the light begins to fade at the end of the day, no one present on Saturday night will forget to see the shadows of the Lions Brisbane completing a remarkable return.

Throughout the city, people are linked by the presence of team scarves, regardless of what colors adorn them. Collingwood and Port fans try to solve the front problems of Melbourne, Crow about Sam Darcy and wonder what will happen if Jack Ginnivan kicks the first goal on Sunday night.

It is easy to be cynical about things like this. And, of course, every time you have the league working so closely with a government in anything that there will be multiple agendas at stake.

But this only works. It works in this city, it works in these reasons, it works for the wide variety of people who are attracted to something like this.

We were all these children with eyebrows once, with posters on the wall and numbers on the back of our guernsys. In a charming and unexpected turn, somehow here in Adelaide, everyone experienced that fundamental wonder for the game again.

It makes you ask you why Footy can’t feel like this every week.