Some players are born to play AFL football. Like Josh Kennedy. Some breeze through the traditional talent pathway and draft process to fulfill their childhood dream. Like Luke Parker. And others just have to work damn hard. Like Dane Rampe.

They could hardly have been more different. Kennedy, from a family of football royalty in Melbourne in which his grandfather and father together boasted 817 AFL games, 11 grand finals and seven premierships.

Parker, from Langwarrin in Melbourne’s south-eastern outskirts, a prodigious young talent who won eight consecutive junior club best and fairest awards before choosing football over a similarly promising basketball career.

And Rampe, son of an Estonian migrant who didn’t play AFL until he was 17 and had to play four years at second and third-tier level before getting a belated chance as a rookie.

Despite their contrasting route to the AFL the veteran Swans trio found themselves playing together in the AFL for the first time in Round 1, 2013 when Sydney, coached for the 50^th time by John Longmire, beat GWS by 30 points in a twilight game at Accor Stadium.

Kennedy, 24, had 28 possessions and a goal to earn three Brownlow Medal votes in his 74^th game for the Swans. Parker, 20, had 20 possessions from limited ground time in his 33^rd game. And Rampe, a 22-year-old debutant, had seven possessions before he was handed the dreaded ‘red vest’ early in the third quarter and spent the rest of the night on the bench.

The three players have all come a long way since that day in 2013, playing together in Grand Finals and sharing the Swans captaincy – but none more so than Rampe.

On Friday night Rampe will play his 200^th AFL game when Sydney takes to the field against Carlton at Marvel Stadium. Kennedy and Parker will be there by his side – a familiar sight for Swans fans as the three have played together 177 times. And never in that time has the club run out without at least two of them.

Statistically, Rampe will the 34^th Swans player to 200 games and just the second behind Kieren Jack born and bred in Sydney. He will be the 9^th-oldest but, more significantly, of the 31 who played only with the Swans, only Andrew Dunkley was older on debut.

Rampe will be just the 41^st player in AFL history to 200 games after starting as a rookie, the 4^th Swans-only rookie behind Heath Grundy, Jack and Brett Kirk, and the 8^th ex-rookie 200-gamer who wore red and white. The others were Darren Jolly, Martin Mattner, Ben McGlynn and Shane Mumford, who started at other clubs.

Grundy and Jack (256 games) and Kirk (241) sit equal 9^th and 12^th on the all-rookie games list headed by ex-Western Bulldogs midfield Matthew Boyd (294), West Coast ruckman Dean Cox (292), St Kilda goalsneak Stephen Milne (275) and North Melbourne defender Michael Firrito (275).

Rampe is among 22 ex-rookies to have won All-Australian honours, with Jack, Kirk and Tom Papley, and he’s among nine ex-rookies to captain their club. Again, with Jack and Kirk.

But for a story of perseverance the journey of the left-footed defender is one out.

He is the son of Estonian migrant Indnek Rampe who came to Australia as an infant with his parents Leonid and Koidu. Like more than 300,000 others, Indnek had his first look at his adopted country at the Bonegilla Migrant Camp, near Albury. Soon after his arrival 13 children at the camp died of malnutrition.

Leonid Rampe was a lawyer in Estonia, a country of about 1.3 million people that sits between Sweden, Finland, Latvia and Russia in northern Europe, but his credentials were not recognised in Australia.

So, after they left the migrant camp, he worked on a tugboat and later as a chicken farmer in Thirlmere in the Macarthur region of NSW, 90km south-west of Sydney. He died in 1987, three years before his grandson was born, but his wife lived to 98.

She lived long enough to see her grandson born in Sydney, grow up in Clovelly, attend Newington College and make his AFL debut in 2013 before she died in 2014.

It was family folklore that Koidu had no understanding of the game, so to ask her to understand the journey Rampe took to reach the game’s highest level would have been senseless. Not a chance.

As a nine-year-old in 1999 he had been among the hoards at the SCG who stormed the ground when Tony Lockett broke the AFL goal-kicking record, but he didn’t play any AFL football until his final year at school, preferring basketball and soccer.

Having joined Williamstown in the VFL after school in the hope of making his way to the AFL, Rampe played 2009, ’10 and ‘11 in the blue and yellow of the Seagulls, helping the one-time club of Barry Round to the inaugural Foxtel Cup for second-tier football in ‘11.

But each year he was overlooked in the draft. Not until he won the Sydney Football League’s Phelan Medal playing with UNSW-Eastern Suburbs and starred for NSW in the Australian Country Championships in 2012 did he finally get his chance.

It came via the 2012 AFL Draft held on the Gold Coast, which provided the bulk of the start-up talent for GWS, headed by Lachie Whitfield at #1.

Sydney drafted Harry Marsh at #44, Tim Membrey at #46, Matthew Dick at #64 in the National Draft, picked up Kurt Tippett in the Pre-Season Draft, and struck gold in the Rookie Draft when they claimed Jake Lloyd at #16, Xavier Richards at #29, Rampe at #37 and Dan Robinson at #50, plus Sydney zone selections Brandon Jack and Sam Naismith.

Rampe had seen 419 players drafted in 2009-10-11 while he was overlooked and was the 92^nd of 101 players drafted in 2012.

Yet 10 years on he will be the first player from the Class of 2012 to reach 200 games. Just as he was first to 100 and 150. Closest to him are the Western Bulldogs’ Jack Macrae (194), Port Adelaide’s Ollie Wines (191), teammate Lloyd (185), Richmond’s Nick Vlastuin (177), Collingwood’s Brodie Grundy (177) and Whitfield (176).

Rampe also leads the AFL Class of 2012 in finals appearances (16), ranks 2^nd behind only Vlastuin in grand final appearances and is 7^th in possessions despite playing in defence.

This year he has climbed to 20^th on the all-time possessions list for the Swans (since statistics were first kept in 1965) and is now 16^th in all-time wins for the club.

It is a career CV that will embarrass recruiters who overlooked him time and again, especially in 2019 when Rampe enjoyed a quadruple celebration at the Swans Club Championship dinner after his first season as a co-captain. He won the Bob Skilton Medal, was voted ‘Players’ Player’ by his teammates, was chosen as Clubman of the Year, and receivership Swans Life Membership.

Not bad for a three-time draft reject. Leonid and Koidu would have been proud!

Congratulations Dane Rampe – 200 games in the red and white.