THERE were three non-negotiables for my dad, John, and his mate, Tim, as they descended on the MCG in 1966.

Get in the ground. Get a seat. And watch St Kilda defeat Collingwood to claim the club’s maiden premiership.

Simple enough. Except for one thing: they were 10 and 11-year-old boys without tickets.

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“In those days it was a boys’ club,” Dad said on a special edition of AFL Daily. 

“There were no women members of the MCC, but the concession was that every member got a ladies ticket.”

So proceeded a game of trial and error.

“Excuse me, Mister. Can I use your ladies ticket to get in?” was the question, repeated over and over.

As it turns out, Dad had more luck than Tim.

“He was struggling. And finally, the gatekeeper was sick of me bouncing the ball, pacing up and down," Dad said.

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“He saw that Tim had no hope. The members were avoiding him like the plague. He said, ‘Get in here, son’.”

Task number one, complete. They were in the ground. The next challenge was finding a seat.

The two boys made their way up to the second level of the members’.

“A very kindly lady agreed to push her row (down) to her right, so Tim and I shared our seat. And there we were," Dad said.

Some two and a half hours later, the Saints had held up their end of the bargain, completing the trifecta of the three non-negotiables.

“Everything was a blur. All we wanted to do was to get on that ground and kick the footy for as long as humanly possible until our parents came and picked us up," Dad said.

“It got dark and we were kicking under the reflected light of the bars, but we knew where our parents would be. I must’ve taken Alan Morrow’s mark 400 times if only Tim could’ve kicked it to me!”

As it turns out, Dad and Tim played on the hallowed turf until 9.30 that night. And – vividly – one moment stands out.

“A figure was walking diagonally across the ground, and we thought, ‘Oh shit, we’re going to get kicked out now’," Dad recalled.

“As it turns out it was Lou Richards, who was the former Collingwood champion captain and media personality at the time.”

Both boys stood still, somewhat immobilised by the icon standing before them.

“Are you Saints supporters?” Richards asked.

“Yes,” they replied nervously.

 “Well done,” Richards said.

One of Dad’s enduring memories from the 1966 Grand Final is just how happy his parents were. And that was significant.

His father, Alan, played 51 games for St Kilda from 1946-51, but didn’t experience much success.

“The classic for me was from round three of 1947 through until round 14 of 1948, St Kilda had not won a game. There may have been a draw in there, but they just hadn’t won," Dad said.

“So 31 games without a win.”

But that wasn’t even the worst of it.

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The Saints were set up for a somewhat humiliating experience when the Murray Valley league issued a challenge during that winless streak: their combined team against St Kilda, with £10,000 on the line.

The club sought to match the bet to little fortune.

“In that era it didn’t matter if you were Jack Dyer or a little battler like Alan Olle, everyone got three quid," Dad said.

“They went to all the committee, all the coterie groups, all the players, all of the supporters, everyone.

“They could only raise 5,000 pounds. The whole St Kilda Football Club could only halve the bet.”

Despite St Kilda’s shortcomings, the Murray Valley League accepted their underwhelming wager.

It made for an uncomfortable bus ride from Junction Oval, even if many of the members on it had come home from the war.

“That was the most nervous three hours going up there,” my grandfather often recalled.

“You could hear a pin drop.”

Ultimately there was little to worry about, with St Kilda returning home victorious.

“We’d simply forgotten how to win.”