This is an edited extract from 'The Things That Make Us' by Nick Riewoldt with Peter Hanlon (Allen & Unwin, $39.99, onsale now).

I clutched my right leg around the shin, pulled my knee towards my chest and looked up at the big screen in search of the replay. There’d been a ‘pop’, perhaps even more of a ‘bang’, loud enough that a couple of Melbourne players nearby said they’d heard it too. It didn’t look, sound or feel good at all. I screamed: ‘Noooo! Nooooooo!’

I’d had grand designs on playing until who knows when, or at least the 2017 season and again the following year if all was well. I’d given myself the best chance to do that. I was playing good footy, and I was in really good shape. In the final pre-season game a fortnight earlier, against Sydney in Albury, my GPS reading was close to a career personal best: 16 kilometres covered in the game, with 2.1 kilometres of high-intensity running, or faster than 20 kilometres an hour. They’re big numbers, especially in a shortened game. I was 34 and starting my seventeenth season, and I’d never been better prepared.

Now it was round 1 and I was sitting on the Etihad Stadium turf, surrounded by teammates, opponents and 36,000 fans but feeling horribly alone. And all I could think was, ‘That’s it.’ Even before our doc Tim Barbour and physio Andrew Wallis got to me, in that short space of time, there was reflection. ‘I’ve been doing this for more than half my life,’ I thought, ‘and this is the moment, this is the end. It’s over.’ I thought I had hurt my right knee in a marking contest but could see from the replay that I’d hyper-extended as I went to push off after landing. I’ve got great relationships with ‘Barbs’and ‘Wal’ and go back a long way with them. When they crouched down next to me I said, ‘I think I’ve done my ACL.’ And I could tell from their faces they thought I’d done it too. I remember saying to Wal, ‘That’s my career, isn’t it?’ He didn’t really answer. 

I disappeared into my own world. The things that went through my head were incredible. I thought about Bob Murphy, whom I’d become close to on an Ireland trip eighteen months earlier, and who cruelly missed the Western Bulldogs premiership after doing his knee early in 2016 not far from where I was sitting. I came to a fantastical acceptance: if this means I’m the sacrificial lamb and we’re going to win the flag, so be it. As thoughts came in a rush I wondered whether the club would give me another year. If they wouldn’t, I wondered if I could have LARS knee surgery and get back in 2017 and with luck play finals one last time.

The crowd got going when I was loaded onto the cart; I could hear and feel them cheering. I wondered if I should give them a thumbs-up to show that I was all right, but that seemed silly because I didn’t know whether I was. In reality I feared I was anything but. I thought about waving, in case it really was the end. Chris Judd had waved after he had done his knee in 2015, knowing it was the last time he would leave the ground as a player. I almost followed his lead, but in the end I just sat there. There’s no back on those little carts, and the bloke who was driving it hit the brakes as we got to the ramp going down into the rooms and almost tipped me off. I slid along the cart, and someone said later they saw me shit myself.

It’s funny the things that stay with you. At the door to the rooms, I climbed off and walked in. I heard later that people had seen that vision on Fox Footy and taken it as a good sign, but I knew walking meant nothing. Lenny Hayes played the week after doing his knee, then went down properly. Clay Smith from the Bulldogs went back on the ground after doing his for the second or third time. Walking doesn’t mean a thing. You can walk with a ruptured ACL. You just can’t play for a year. And when you’re 34, that’s forever.

I sat on the bed in the doctor’s room and they did the test. It’s called the Lachman test: you relax everything, and the doc grabs your thigh with one hand and your leg below the knee with the other and pulls it towards him. It’s obvious if there’s a solid end point, which means the ACL is lengthening and holding the knee in place. Doctor Ian Stone did the test, then he looked at me with a look of surprise. ‘There’s a solid end point.’ We all looked at each other, thinking the same thing. ‘Shit, I haven’t done it!’ They went on and checked my medial, lateral and PCL. If any of those is injured, you miss six to ten weeks, but an ACL is a year. I’d only missed a handful of games in the previous three years, and the season before I’d polled 19 Brownlow votes, the most I’d managed in my career. But the way my contract negotiations had gone over that time, the concern the club had over my body, I wouldn’t have been confident they’d have taken the same approach the Bulldogs took with Murph and backed me to come back in 2018. Thankfully, we didn’t have to find out.

I walked out of the doctor’s room, grabbed my phone and tried to call Cath. It didn’t even ring. Then I tried Alex, no answer. Mum and Dad, no answer. I didn’t want them to stress for any longer than they had to, just to say, ‘I haven’t done my ACL, it’s okay.’ They all appeared in the rooms before I could get anyone on the phone, and I could see James was really upset. He wasn’t crying, but he was rattled. He knew there was something wrong with Dad. Even a couple of days later, walking him around our neighbourhood, he was sitting in the stroller, saying, ‘Daddy fell over. Daddy’s knee. Daddy went on the little car.’ We went home, put the boys to bed, got some burgers delivered and sat on the couch. It was a strange feeling, having just looked my football mortality in the face.

Cath was funny— her sister Vivian was getting married in Houston three weeks later, and Cath was very glass-half-full about the prospect of my knee being shot. I don’t think I was even off the ground and she was online, looking up flights. Before I’d had the knee scanned there was apparently a buzz in her social circle back home, ‘Nick might be coming to the wedding now!’ In ‘sliding door’ moments I’ve wondered what would have happened if the Lachman test had gone the way we’d feared: That there had been no end point when the doc tugged my leg, and the ACL was ruptured. It would have made for a crazy few days of conversations about the future and big, big decisions. If the club had said they didn’t see a place for me in 2018, I might have had LARS surgery and tried to play again in 2017. Or I might have jumped on a plane and moved to Texas. Who knows. Again, thankfully, we didn’t have to find out.

When I was back on the couch, Murph got in touch and sent me two photos—one of me going off on the cart, and one of him walking off after he’d done his knee—to show how tough he is and how soft I am. I called him and we had a chuckle. I don’t think people really know what to say in those situations; it wasn’t until Sunday, when it was confirmed I was okay, that I started getting a lot of messages. I had gone on TV and said I felt like a bit of a goose when it turned out that it wasn’t an ACL. I would have felt like a bigger goose if I’d waved to the crowd on the way off. Imagine that: the grand farewell, waving to the fans, throwing my boots into the crowd, asking the driver to do a lap of honour . . . and it turns out my knee is pretty much fine.

The next morning I had a scan at 8 a.m. at Victoria House that confirmed there was no cartilage damage, no ligament damage and best of all no ACL damage. I’d split the capsule that surrounds the whole joint and stops the synovial fluid from leaking out. The capsule is quite thick, which is why I felt a pop. They put it at anywhere from two to six weeks. In the end I missed a week.

Nick will be launching the book at Readings Bookstore in St Kilda on Monday. Click here for a full list of book signings around the country.