For some reason, over the past few weeks, I’ve started doing something that feels oddly unfamiliar and deeply familiar at the same time:

I’ve been watching Friday night footy.

NRL. On purpose. Enjoying it.

And I can’t fully explain why.

It’s not like I’ve suddenly become one of those people with strong opinions about forward packs and completion rates. I’m not out here yelling at the TV like a suburban dad in a recliner. But something about it has felt… nice. Comforting, almost. Which surprised me.

Because footy was a household staple growing up.

Friday nights in Orange meant takeout and the game on TV. We had a roster for picking dinner, each week it was someone else’s turn, and naturally I’d lobby hard for McDonald’s or Eagle Boys Pizza like it was my civic duty. Then we’d all settle in and watch the footy.

My dad grew up playing. He coached too. So I spent a fair bit of time around footy fields, changerooms, muddy boots, and all the very specific rituals that come with men throwing themselves at each other for eighty minutes.

Which means I grew up with just enough footy knowledge to be useful.

Not passionate. Not committed. But fluent enough.

And honestly? I think that fluency protected me a little.

There was probably always a sense that I was a bit different. I don’t know if people would have had the language for “gay” back then, or at least in the right context (I know I didn’t), but they definitely clocked something. Still, I could speak footy. I knew the terms. I could hold my own in a conversation about the game. And in a regional town, that kind of thing buys you a surprising amount of camouflage.

I think it spared me from a certain kind of teasing. Unlike some others.

In fact, one guy I went to high school with once confronted me about exactly that at a Beresford Sunday years later, why he got teased for being gay and I somehow didn’t. Which is, admittedly, an incredible sentence to type. But that’s probably a story for another blog.

Looking back now, there was also something else going on that I absolutely did not have the language for at the time.

Because while footy was family culture and social currency and a way to fit in, there was also… curiosity.

A lot of it.

The changerooms. The showers. The fields. The bodies. The thighs. Dear God, the thighs.

And in hindsight, it’s genuinely astonishing that I didn’t realise I was gay until my early twenties. Even more astonishing that my parents apparently had no clue until I came out to them at 29. Because if I’m really honest with myself, there were clues. Repeatedly. Running around in footy shorts.

Maybe that’s where my appreciation for legs came from. Maybe that was the beginning of it all. Not in some grand, cinematic sexual awakening kind of way, just a quiet, persistent noticing that meant more than I understood at the time.

So now I find myself back here, years later, watching Friday night footy again.

And I’m trying to work out why.

Maybe it’s nostalgia. Maybe it takes me back to those nights at home in Orange, back when family life still had a rhythm I didn’t have to create for myself. Maybe there’s comfort in the routine of it: takeaway, couch, game, night unfolding in a familiar order.

Maybe it reminds me of my dad. Of the world he came from. Of the bits of masculinity I grew up around that I could participate in, even if I never quite belonged to them in the same way.

Or maybe (and this does feel possible) I’ve simply reached a point in life where I can enjoy footy for all its many layers.

The nostalgia.
The culture.
The familiarity.
The fact that it still gives me enough conversational currency to survive certain rooms.

And yes, if we’re being completely honest, the visual spectacle of a bunch of hot, sweaty men throwing each other to the ground under stadium lights.

Maybe Heated Rivalry has also done irreparable damage to my brain. Maybe I now watch the game with a tiny, involuntary expectation that the on-field tension might eventually develop into something that requires me to have both hands free and ready.

Who’s to say.

All I know is that I’m watching Friday night footy again, and for reasons both wholesome and suspicious, I’m into it.

Maybe not everything from your childhood has to stay where you left it. Maybe sometimes things come back around and mean something new. Or reveal what they always meant, if you’d known how to read them properly the first time.

Either way, pass the lube pizza.