Or perhaps it’s because the yardstick I’ve long used to measure age – how my own compares with the eldest AFL player – is still alive for another year, with Dustin Fletcher in his 21st season at Essendon.
Growing up, my footy idols – Peter Daicos, Tony Lockett, Rod Carter – always seemed a lifetime older. They were men – strong, tall, burly men – with muscles, moustaches, chest hair and mullets.
In hindsight, many of them were only kids themselves. But through the eyes of a star-struck kid, they were giants: wise, gladiatorial... and hairy.
It wasn’t until I turned 18, after a couple of my junior footballing peers got picked up in the AFL draft (while I commenced a short, ignoble career with the Cobram seconds) that I realised I was closing the age gap on many of my AFL heroes.
Hitting the latter half of my booze-fuelled twenties, I started going past them. And yet, I retained a youthful, if delusional, brashness. My rationale was this: so as long as I fell within the age parameters of the AFL's playing elite, I still had some semblance of youth to hold on to.
Of course, those days are numbered. Each year the list has diminished, and for the past few seasons, since Barry Hall’s retirement, there’s only been one: Fletch.
Just as the thirty-somethings in the early '90s must have done with Michael Tuck, I’ve secretly cheered on the gangly, super-resilient Essendon stalwart each week, hoping he’ll sustain his stellar form and not cop any serious injuries. Luckily, he remains a key to his inconsistent, work-in-progress – and, recently, scandal-plagued – side’s fortunes. He may even play on in 2014, meaning I can tick the 'young box' – or my version of it – for a little while yet.
Deep down, though, I realise my youth is teetering by a boot lace; I know there's a reason I don't get called 'young fella' any more. Heck, I've now outlived Jim Morrison – who looked about 50 when he died – by eight years. I'm already 21 years older than Sindhuja Rajaram, who, in becoming the head of animation company Seppan at 14, is the youngest CEO in the world. The best AFL players – Judd, Ablett, Swan, Franklin – are all born in the '80s, while the next generation, led by 1990 baby Trent Cotchin and 1993 (yes, 1993)-born Jonathon Patton, arrived in a decade that saw the rise and fall of grunge, the Spice Girls and Monica Lewinsky.
More worryingly, half the coaches are, like me, '70 babies. Having grown up watching the likes of Allan Jeans and Tony Jewell ply their trade while looking as old as my pop, it's a little disconcerting to see the Scott brothers – just 11 months my senior – barking instructions from the coaches' box.
Asking around, I realised I wasn't alone in the practice of using the ages, actions and looks of prominent people to get a sense of one's own expiry date. My father-in-law, for example, knew his country footy career was almost up when Billy Picken retired; it was only natural given their careers – he at Echuca, Picken at Collingwood – started at the same time. My uncle says a similar thing about Peter Daicos.
Other sports and high-end celebrities got a look in, too. My sister, a self-proclaimed age-obsessive, is one of the few who'd prefer Lleyton Hewitt keep up the brattish on-court racket rather than hang up his racquet. They were born three weeks apart and watching him mix it with the best keeps her young – or at least feeling that way. My mother was struck by her own mortality when Olivia Newton-John – still blond and beautiful but 30 years on from that black lycra suit – turned 60 a few years back. Then there's my friend, an avid Royal watcher, who found herself confronted by Prince Charles's fossilled appearance at Will and Kate's wedding last year. She recalls him as a relatively young man – or, as she later worked out, the same age as she is now.
With almost all my childhood heroes having bowed out of their respective sports (did anyone else my age feel a little wistful when Steve Waugh retired from Test cricket in 2003 after 19 seasons; or when Robert Harvey, who debuted for St Kilda in 1988, finally hung up the boots?), perhaps its time to find a new measuring stick by which to gauge my age. Perhaps I’ll turn to the golf or lawn bowls circuit.
Maybe I'll even accept middle age – seen to begin at 35, 40 or 45, depending on your source – with good grace.
