It must have been late on some Saturday afternoon (foolishly) driving on Punt Road, the traffic backed up, the city engaged in a giant logistical pantomime of cars and trains and everywhere people in team colors, all jammed together, inching along, when the idea for The Family Men first came to me. A friend of mine had been working on a verse novel, and I was seeing the world through a scrim of metaphors and half-rhyme, time slowing and expanding in metrical feet.

The steely grey-blue of a cloudless winter sky. The snap of frozen grass. Rain. Imagining steam rising from muscular bodies, slick with hard-earned sweat. Bitter cold. And then, a hot shower. Laughter. The pleasure of friendship. Brotherhood. Family. Tradition. Hierarchy. Power. Anticipation. Retrospection. Doubt. Love. Sex. Fear. Betrayal. Death.

Football is religion is pandemonium. Before that altar (call it the MCG or the TV), we forget our physicality in contemplation of the divine, collectively rising up in glory of something greater than ourselves. And in that rising we are lost, dis-aggregated from our particulars, the past nullified, our spirits melding with the congregation’s until we are whole. We are all and we are one and we are restored. Hallelujah! Joy is rapture is regeneration amid the chaos. A wild, noisy uproar that rides roughshod over the daily drudge. That smashes the ho-hum of the working week. That can’t be controlled. That is happiness.

And with each new round, hundreds of thousands of people gather to worship at that church, society thrumming with its reverberations: The tipping, the analysis, the to-ing and the fro-ing, the game itself, the commentary, the rehashing. Reset. And on it goes. February to October. Year after year. But what happens when that season’s done, or worse, if you stop believing? What will you do with yourself then? And whose songs will you sing?

Which is the place I chose as the starting point of my novel, an ending for the beginning.

The Family Men is available now.