Something peculiar happens when Mackenzie Hawkesby takes a corner.
It is as though the Sydney FC midfielder falls into a kind of trance, channelling a different energy from some other place we cannot see. Her movements slow down, her breathing becomes deep and steady, her eyes focus in as the rest of the world melts away.
The manner in which she approaches the ball – the angle of her run-up, the geometry of her body, the way it flies flat and hard like an arrow through the air – seems to echo something from the past.
There has only been one other player in recent A-League Women history who could hit a ball like that.
Hawkesby knows. They were teammates not too long ago.
"When [Teresa Polias] left, she didn't teach me how to take them, but I always used to watch her," Hawkesby said.
"She used to drive them instead of whipping them. I remember, in my first season when I took over from her, my first game, I hit them all out. I was like, 'oh no'.
"And then I was actually with Ellie Brush in the next session and she stood with me and [taught] me the technique: try to drive the ball like a centre-back would.
"So I just practiced a couple, and eventually I got the swing of things, and I think over time I've gotten better with my power and range. Within the game, as I've gotten a bit older and stronger, once I found my groove, it just started working."
It was these lessons of the past that Hawkesby drew upon in the third minute of Sunday afternoon's A-League Women grand final as Sydney FC won the first corner and the midfielder began her routine.
She already sensed that this match against Western United was going to be special. It was her best friend and captain Natalie Tobin's 100th game, after all: a player whose debut for the Sky Blues came in a grand final that they then went on to win.
And as she watched her corner sail towards the back post, landing squarely on the forehead of Madison Haley before bouncing clean into the net, she could feel the past circling back towards them.
Call it luck, call it destiny: 15 minutes later, off exactly the same corner routine, the ball deflected off Haley and fell right onto the head of Tobin herself, who powered it up and over the tangle of bodies and across the goal line to make it 2-0.
Rarely this season had Sydney scored from corner kicks, and rarely this season had Western conceded from them. But now it had happened twice, here, in this game of all games: the one Sydney had tried and failed to win in each of the past three seasons.
And now they were going into half-time with the lead, having not just answered the questions Western asked of them in their semifinal defeat two weeks ago, but having written entire flourishing paragraphs around them.
They were the better team in almost every way: faster to the ball, hungrier in their press, more precise in their passing, more varied in their attack, more collective in their defence.
They moved with and around each other almost without thought; their rotations and runs triggered by some deeper understanding of the system, like the unstoppable dance of planets on an invisible axis.
As they did in the major semifinal, Western's modus operandi was to simply try and break that system into pieces.
They clattered and crashed into Sydney's players, leaving sky-blue bodies strewn across the grass, trying to drag the delicate dancers into a world of chaos. Haley was wrestled from behind, Cortnee Vine was swept off her feet, Princess Ibini was pulled down into the dirt.
But coming into half-time, it seemed like trying to deny this Sydney side was like trying to defy gravity. This sense of inevitability spilled into the second half, and when Ibini neatly scored their third goal just on the hour-mark, leaping over the barricade to celebrate with the club's ecstatic fans, Western knew this story had already been written.
A fourth goal to Haley in the game's closing stages was the exclamation point: the final, emphatic reminder that Sydney FC are now the outright greatest team in the history of this competition.
It's fitting that Polias, now retired and working as a commentator, was in the stands watching them do it. The veteran midfielder was part of the generation of players who carried the club, and the A-League Women, from one era into the next, passing down her wisdom like an elder matriarch to her wide-eyed and curious children.
But there had always been a lingering question over whether this new crop of Sydney players were capable of living up to the glories of the club's own past. Only once had the Sky Blues won the double — all the way back in 2009, when some of its current players were still in nappies – while their last championship came when their squad was heaving with Matildas and international stars.
Comparatively, the Sydney FC of the past three seasons were largely unknown; their squad a patchwork of peripheral talents. Rather than focusing on what they weren't, though, head coach Ante Juric had always focused on what they could be.
In the five seasons since he took charge, just two players remain from the old guard: Tobin and Ibini. He and his staff were the ones who plucked the smaller cogs of Hawkesby, Vine, Jada Whyman, Charlotte McLean, Sarah Hunter, Rachel Lowe, Kirsty Fenton, and Charlie Rule from the boxes and benches of other clubs and turned them into a beautiful machine.
"I don't really speak about the past, because the past is done," he said after the full-time whistle.
"I can't change anything. I know people talk about hoodoos, and hopefully I've put it to the girls: I don't care what happened. We can't change it.
"So I look forward, not back. And today was forward. We have to worry about today, not what happened two years ago, three years ago, ten years ago."
But this grand final win showed that the past – as well as the future – is alive in this Sydney FC team.
It lives in the technique of Mackenzie Hawkesby over a corner ball, in the leadership of Natalie Tobin, in the experienced swagger of Princess Ibini, in the bruised tenacity of Cortnee Vine.
It lives in the culture and mentality that has blossomed amongst them season after season, passed down like book of secrets from veterans like Polias and Brush, tying them to each other and to all those who came before.
It lives in the arrival of teenagers Shay Hollman and Indiana Dos Santos (who on Sunday became the youngest ever player to appear in a grand final at just 15 years old: the same age as the league itself), gathered into the arms of the game and knowing, deep down, that they belong there.
And it will continue to live in the minds of whoever comes next: those watching from the stands, wide-eyed and curious at this beautiful dance, realising, perhaps for the first time, that they can belong here too.
"We were nobodies before we came to this team," Hawkesby said. "Genuinely, we weren't.
"When I came to the club, there's about 10 of us that have made this core group: from Nat, me, Prin[cess], Jada, Cortnee.
"There's a lot of us that aren't part of the Matildas, and we aren't now. But at the end of the day, what we've done is so special.
"It's not just how good we are individually on the field, but off the field. I don't think people understand how close we are [...] I never thought I would meet these type of people through my career, and that's what is instilled on the field.
"You can just tell we have such a good group. At the end of the day, I think we've left a pretty good legacy."
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