As the drama surrounding Willie Rioli continued during the week, one name kept popping into my head.
Adam Goodes is one of the best players Australian football has seen, a dual Brownlow medallist, four-time All-Australian, and three-time best and fairest,12th on the all-time games list with 372.
His exit from AFL football should have been a moment of universal acclaim. Instead it became one of the most shameful episodes in our game's history, Goodes effectively turning his back on the sport after it failed to support him amidst a disgraceful campaign of hatred directed his way.
His crime? Plenty will tell you it was because he "played for free kicks". Or other rationalisations which defy the timeline of the whole sordid episode. But there was only ever one underlying cause. That Goodes was a proud black man outspoken in his belief that an undercurrent of racism still plagued this country.
Rioli, of course, has a long, long way to go before he can match Goodes as a player. But when he posted an emotional diatribe on social media about his deep-seated "hatred" for Hawthorn, where his late father Willie senior had spent 1991 and where his cousin Cyril was a four-time premiership star, he triggered a familiar visceral response.
We literally never go through an AFL season without several examples of Indigenous players being racially vilified, either at games or on social media, so the follow-up to Rioli's contentious claims about Hawthorn's treatment of his father and cousin in that sense didn't surprise. It's more the vehemence of those reactions which are most telling.
As they always were with Goodes, for whom some of the almost pathological hatred was quite at odds with the supposedly far more benign motivation for his jeering, the hardly capital offence of staging for free kicks.
Football being the tribal game that it is, Hawthorn fans were never going to take too kindly to Rioli's claims so of course there was going to be blowback. But ask yourself this.
Had Rioli posted the same words talking about the alleged mistreatment of other family members as a white man, would the reaction have been nearly so fierce, in some cases bordering on unhinged, that the player had been forced not only to close their account, but to take some mental health leave? I very much doubt it.
No one will admit this, of course. For Goodes, it was "staging for free kicks" or for "bullying a young girl" in the case of the teenager he referred to MCG security in 2013 for calling him an "ape", but whom he then offered to counsel, refusing to press charges and calling on the media not to vilify her.
More laughably still, for some commentators, it was about doing a tribal war dance on the SCG and "threatening" some crowd members with an imaginary spear. There's always seemingly some other rationale, some plausible denial about the far more unpalatable truth of racial intolerance.
So in Rioli's case, it will supposedly be about his taunting of Hawthorn's Changkuoth Jiath as he ran into an open goal. Or his previous AFL suspension in 2019 for cannabis use and tampering with a drug test. Never mind that the latter has until now induced not a peep out of opposition fans since he returned from that suspension in 2022.
When it emerged that one of the sources of Rioli's anger about Hawthorn was Jason Dunstall's speech at last year's Australian football Hall of Fame dinner, I at first recalled laughing along with nearly everyone else at his story about beating Willie Rioli senior home in a time trial.
Then, unlike on the evening, I thought about how that story might have come across to a young man still grieving the loss of his beloved dad only two years previously, a man who had been a hero not only to his son, but to a lot of Indigenous people whom he had inspired with his football, his mentoring and community work.
That cast the anecdote in an entirely different perspective. I don't think less of Dunstall for having told it. After all, the yarn made me laugh, too. But it was certainly a stark reminder of how different a place we come from as well-to-do white people on familiar turf.
Former Indigenous sporting star turned politician Nova Peris, who had attended high school with Wille Rioli senior, wrote a powerful piece about the episode in Thursday's Herald Sun.
"Willie came from a community of fewer than 400 people. He left everything he knew: his language, his Country, his culture, his kin," she wrote. "He left that for an opportunity and that journey alone should be respected. That journey alone is powerful. It was heroic. But instead, he was mocked. Ridiculed. Two years after his death.
"People who have never been marginalised or racially vilified often don't understand the weight of these moments. They have no skin in the game. They've never had to carry the scars of racism or sit in silence because speaking out might cost them everything."
But it's one thing not to understand the weight of such moments. And another even more disturbing level altogether to actually become overly-defensive and aggressive when Indigenous people attempt to articulate those grievances.
You can feel that hostility growing, too, more so since the Voice to Parliament referendum was defeated in October 2023, a decision more opportunistic political operators and their media cheer squads have used as an excuse for more overt racial intolerance, and for attempts at petty punitive measures like getting rid of harmless Welcome to Country ceremonies.
It would have been nice had the AFL, along with Port Adelaide and the AFL Players Association, come out with a bold and unambiguous condemnation of the racism that Rioli junior copped this week.
Instead, it preferred to let others carry the load, just as it failed for four years to issue an apology to Adam Goodes for standing back and allowing his disgraceful treatment to continued unchallenged.
The sad truth is that while AFL football is full of symbolic gestures like Sir Doug Nicholls round and dusky images of young Indigenous kids playing footy barefoot in red deserts, it's also a code and an organisation which "don't want no trouble" from such uppity folk.
Many of its most devout fans like to pat themselves on the back about Indigenous influence on the AFL, but also want to ignore falling participation rates, while continuing not to be bothered seeking a greater understanding of Indigenous practices and culture.
And yes, continuing to become very, very annoyed when our Indigenous brethren cease just to be beautiful to watch on a football field, and actually want to be heard as well as seen.
Sorry football, and indeed sorry white Australia, but we still just don't get it. And every time something like this week's events unfold, I seriously doubt we ever will.
You can read more of Rohan Connolly's work at FOOTYOLOGY.