Paul Kelly was a shy, unassuming 20-year-old when he walked into a packed Princes Park Oval at Carlton on Saturday, 31 March 1990 to make his VFL debut.

Wearing jumper #45 and weighing about 65kg he joked that he was so skinny he had the #4 on the front of his jumper and the #5 on the back.

Kelly was the youngest member of the Swans side, while 35-year-old fullback Rod Carter, playing his 287^th game, was the oldest.  Kelly was aged four and hadn’t started school when Carter debuted in 1974.

The crowd of 22,427 wasn’t all that many short of the entire population of Kelly’s home town of Wagga, and more people than he had ever seen in one place.

“I was blown away,” he recalled ahead of the 28^th anniversary of his first game. “I’d only ever been to one VFL game in my life before I played that day and I had no idea what to expect.”

It was Round 1 as Sydney, coached by Col Kinnear and captained by Dennis Carroll, opened the 1990 season.

Memories? “I know we won by a few points (five) and Barry Mitchell kicked the winning goal. We’d been behind all day and come home strong in the last quarter,” Kelly recalled.

“I played forward pocket or half forward and had a shocker. I didn’t get near it. I reckon I had about three kicks and didn’t do anything.”

In fact the official statistics say Kelly had 12 disposals and two tackles as the Swans, 45 points down at halftime and still 24 points down at the last change, kicked 6.5 to 2.0 in the final quarter to win 15.14 (104) to 14.15 (99).

Mitchell kicked three goals and had 31 possessions, Greg Williams had 43 possessions and two goals to earn three Brownlow Medal votes, and Gerard Healy had 28 possessions and a goal.

“I didn’t grow up watching footy so I had no idea who Greg Williams and Gerard Healy were. It was a good thing because if I did I probably would have been awe-struck,” he said.

And who kicked five goals for the Swans that day? Kelly hesitated. When reminded it was another debutant, he recalled it was Shane Fell, a 22-year-old from Tasmania who had originally been recruited by Geelong before being handed over to the Swans.

Fell, an under-sized full forward, equalled the club record for most goals on debut and followed up with six goals against Geelong in Round 7. He finished the year with 30 goals from 15 games before walking away from the AFL.

Fell was beaten for the club goal-kicking trophy that year by another Round 1 debutant: Jim West. West, a centre half forward from South Australia, kicked two goals in the first game he shared with Kelly and Fell, and finished the season with 34 goals from 22 games.

The fourth Swans debutant that day was West Australian ruckman Brad Tunbridge. And while Fell, West and Tunbridge played only 102 games between them, it was a red letter day for the club if only because it was the first outing for one of the all-time greats.

Kelly played 10 games in his debut season, losing the next nine, and went on to total 234 games.

He won the Brownlow Medal in 1995, was All-Australian in 1995, ’96 and ’97, won the club championship in 1992, ’93, ’96 and ’97, and was captain from 1993-2002. He was named vice-captain of the Swans Team of the Century in 2003 and inducted into the AFL Hall of Fame in 2007.

Yet the man they called ‘Captain Courageous’ could easily have slipped through the AFL net. Born in West Wyalong, but living in Wagga from the very early days, he was a rugby league player until he was 15.

Laurie Daley, a future NRL star, Australian representative and NSW State of Origin coach, played with Junee in the same junior division. “He was very good and they were the best team. We couldn’t beat them and I had him running over the top of me for 10 years,” Kelly recalled.

“For some reason I played one year of AFL in the Under 12s. I can’t really remember why but I really enjoyed it. I was probably better suited to AFL because I was small and when I got to 16 I decided to concentrate on that,” he said.

Doing a plumbing apprenticeship after he’d finished school, Kelly was playing senior football with the Wagga Tigers at 18. He was very happy with life, and fully expected it to stay that way.

And then one Saturday after a game Kelly went to the local pub with teammates. There the Swans fairytale began. And ironically, it was a North Melbourne recruiter who helped get the ball rolling.

Fellow Wagga boy Wayne Carey and John Longmire, from nearby Corowa-Rutherglen, were already playing with North, and North recruiting boss Greg Miller had a mate who did some scouting in the Riverina district named Greg Leech.

“He (Leech) came over for a chat and asked if I’d be interested in going down to the Kangaroos,” Kelly recalled, noting that Carey’s brother Dick was Tigers’ assistant-coach.

“I didn’t think too much of it, to be honest, but next thing I knew I had five or six clubs ringing up. I’d never heard of any of them.  At this stage I hadn’t seen or spoken to anyone from the Swans. In those days there was one game of AFL and one game of NRL on TV each weekend and I wasn’t too interested in what was going on outside Wagga.

“Then a bloke from the Swans rang up – I can’t remember his name – and he explained if I was going anywhere in the AFL it was to the Swans because I was zoned there.

“Sydney was like a world away and initially I wasn’t too keen. I was worried I’d go down there and I’d get used up and spat out.  I didn’t go for a couple of years but they kept at me.

“My dad (John) was a good country sprinter. He was invited down to run in the Stawell Gift but he never went. I remember him saying to me ‘what’s the worst thing that can happen? You may as well go because if you don’t you’ll never know’.

“The club persevered and eventually I played a couple of trials and a couple of Reserves games. I finally moved to Sydney in January 1990 and it was only then that I realised I was as good as them.”

The Swans helped Kelly get a plumbing job to finish his apprenticeship and he moved into a flat with former schoolmate Michael Buchanan, from Coolamon, near Wagga, who had relocated to the big smoke the year before.

Almost immediately, there was a problem. In those days there was a Pre-Season or March Draft, and Buchanan was cut.

The saviour was Rob Kerr, a former North Melbourne and Sydney player who post-career served as CEO of the AFLPA and football boss at the Brisbane Lions and Essendon.

“He is a great guy. He was a bit older and had moved to Sydney a couple of years earlier, and luckily enough he took me in.

“I went to Sydney straight from home and had no idea about washing and ironing or cooking dinner so he (Kerr) was a God-send. We lived together for two or three years in a couple of places and he was very good to me.”

And the rest, as they say, is history.

In addition to his own magnificent career, Kelly presented the 2005 premiership cup to Sydney coach Paul Roos and captain Barry Hall, and in 2006 he presented Adam Goodes’ second Brownlow Medal.

When the GWS Giants joined the AFL in 2012 they recruited Kelly to be something of an ambassador for the club in the Wagga district. He did it for two years but it didn’t really work. “I’m a Swan ... it felt like I was working for the enemy,” he said.

Now 48, Kelly lives these days on a 100-acre property close to Wagga on the Murrumbidgee River.

“I’m 3km from the main street and 800m from the nearest pub, although I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing,” he said with a laugh.

The pub is the Black Swan – so it seems Kelly is destined to remain close to a Swan, of sorts!

He also works a 600-acre property he owns further out of town, growing cereal crops, fattening up some lambs, doing farm contracting work in the area sewing and spraying paddocks, and ferrying livestock.

He gets to a Sydney game once or twice a year, but life for one of the greatest Swans of all-time is in Wagga with wife Lyndelle and their five children, aged from 14 to 21.

“I’ve got three boys and two girls and I get a lot of joy out of watching them play football and netball. I keep an eye on the Swans and like catching up with the old teammates, but I don’t really have a lot to do with footy.”

That was it for the interview with the thoroughly likeable and down-to-earth mega-champion, except for one thing. He’d also told a story that destroyed what for many Swans people has been an ill-founded myth.

Why did Kelly wear jumper #14 from his second year on after starting his career in #45? It wasn’t because he was given it by the club to perpetuate the legacy of triple Brownlow Medallist and club legend Bob Skilton, as the romantics might have suspected.,

“I didn’t know anything about Bob Skilton at the time. I’d always worn #7 at the Wagga Tigers and when they were giving out numbers for 1991 I asked for #7. I found out that Dennis Carroll, who was captain, wore #7 so I decided two times seven is 14 ... I’ll have 14. And I did.”