When Nathan Buckley's decade-long tenure as Collingwood coach came to an end midway through 2021, there was a silver lining for the club amid the painful exit of the club legend.
Buckley's tenure had seen the Pies flirt with winning a premiership in 2018 and 2019 before ultimately failing, but by the time he wrapped up, Collingwood seemed well out of the premiership window.
The silver lining came in the form of a player who was yet to set foot on an AFL field: Nick Daicos, then a teenager touted as a generational prospect years before he was eligible to be drafted.
The AFL world was no stranger to the Daicos surname due to the exploits of Nick's famous father Peter, who had become immortalised at Collingwood as a member of the club's 1990 premiership side.
You did not need to be a Collingwood fanatic to know about Nick Daicos, everyone around the game knew the kid was on the way due to his prolific exploits at the junior levels.
The weight of expectation that comes with the level of hype Daicos had as a draft prospect can prove crippling. Unfortunately, there are years of evidence of this.
Sometimes even the most hyped prospects can take time to fit into the AFL system and it makes sense. These are boys coming to a man's game.
The more rigorous training regimes, the expanded playbooks, the media commitments, the dietary requirements and everything else that comes with being an AFL player can be too much. That is even before we get to the pace of the game being completely different.
That has not been the case with Daicos, who as an audacious Nike advert claimed on the morning of the Brownlow count, has proven to be inevitable from day one.
From his very first game, Daicos showcased an ability to bend the game to his will in ways not seen by teenagers, and we have all been blessed to witness it.
Daicos's arrival helped catapult Collingwood from second-last in 2021 to fourth in his first season in the AFL.
Collingwood fell one point short of a grand final appearance in Daicos's debut season, but went all the way in his second.
After collecting boatloads of the football across halfback while occasionally dipping his toes in the midfield as a rookie, Daicos supercharged the Pies engine room in 2023, helping them claim the flag, and he has not looked back since.
From very early on in Daicos's career, the Brownlow win appeared to be a question of when rather than if, but it was the one accolade he was frustratingly made to wait on.
Daicos followed up his premiership by polling a ridiculous 38 votes in 2024, the most by any player in the league's history up until that point, only for that year's winner, Patrick Cripps, to poll 45.
Last year, he was again a seemingly unbackable favourite before being stunned by Gold Coast's Matt Rowell.
Missing out on a Brownlow after being among the favourites for a few years can be something that follows you.
Marcus Bontempelli, despite widely being considered the best player of his generation, is yet to win the prestigious medal.
Buckley was famously made to wait year after year before eventually breaking through in 2003, his 11th season, while Gary Ablett Jr was even denied by his own teammate before his maiden Brownlow triumph. It is almost a rite of passage if you're an all-timer.
Despite Bontempelli, Zak Butters and Bailey Smith all challenging him at various points during the count, this year Daicos would not be denied.
Almost in revenge for the previous two seasons, this year, Daicos turned in an individual season that would ultimately prove impossible to ignore for the umpires.
Daicos broke Cripps's record with 47 votes and set a few more records along the way.
He is now the only player in league history to poll over 30 votes in three consecutive seasons, the only player to put together six straight three-vote games, and the only player to put together 13 three-vote games in a single season.
Given the ease with which Daicos has played from his first contest in the AFL four seasons ago, it was surprising to talk about the weight of expectation actually weighing on him after winning his elusive first Brownlow.
You get the sense that the weight of expectation might be the only thing that is capable of slowing him down, because efforts from his AFL counterparts to do so have so far proven futile.
For a player that is so metronomic and seemingly superhuman on the field, it was refreshing to hear Daicos admit he too deals with nerves and struggles to deal with criticism, just like the rest of us.
Daicos admitted to the Brownlow win being a relief after being denied for so many years as a favourite, even saying he had given up trusting in betting markets.
Now that the Brownlow box has been ticked off, it is frightening to think of what an unburdened Daicos could potentially achieve.
Still just 23 years of age, Daicos has gone from being the precocious youngster to one of Collingwood's veterans, and he will act as the bridge from one era of Collingwood premiership contention to the next, just as Scott Pendlebury did.
He seems good enough to single-handedly wrench Collingwood's premiership window open for as long as he wants.
Adding premierships to his 2023 triumph will be at the top of Daicos's to-do list, and the hope will be that in the process of achieving that goal, his resume ultimately becomes undeniable.
The chance to be Collingwood's greatest player is in play. The chance to be the greatest player in league history is as well, as premature as that shout may seem.
The records Daicos set with his maiden Brownlow win will eventually be just another footnote for a player who is poised to re-write the game's history books.
Like the commercial said: inevitable.
