Half an hour before the Socceroos' final World Cup qualifying match against Peru on Tuesday morning, head coach Graham Arnold was handed a small gold pin.
The pin took the form of a medieval shield, the type often used on football club crests around the world.
The detailing was quite simple: a sky-blue background, a bright gold kangaroo, a large black letter "A", and the number 1922.
Arnold held the pin carefully, feeling the weight of it in his hands, before hooking it into the fabric of his shirt on the left side of his chest, right next to the bright green logo of Australia.
The pin was given to Arnold to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the first recorded Socceroos match, which took place a century ago this Friday.
It was a small gesture, but one that captured the essence of Arnold's stewardship of this team and its story over the past few nerve-wracking months: namely, how he has navigated the transition from the past to the future.
On the one hand, Graham Arnold is one of the last remaining links to a chapter of the Socceroos' history that is now drawing to a close.
As both a player and a coach, he has been part of the national team set-up during its most significant moments over the past three decades, from the World Cup qualifying loss to Iran in 1997, to the famous win over Uruguay in 2005 and, now, to the team's fifth consecutive appearance in Qatar later this year.
On both sides of the white line, Arnold has helped define the history, culture, and identity of the Socceroos as modern fans have known them. The reverence with which he wears the small gold pin on his chest is not feigned: his story and the story of this national team are deeply, existentially intertwined.
But that connection has not always sat comfortably with his critics.
As the Socceroos' fortunes began to turn on them during qualifying earlier this year, and with concerns growing around the team's tactics and player selections heading into the continental play-offs, Arnold increasingly drew upon this well-spring of emotion and history to try and resuscitate the public's (and perhaps also the players') fading optimism.
"It's an old Aussie trait," he said before the UAE match, when fan sentiment was at one of its lowest ebbs.
"That was the way it used to be in Australia [...] and that's what I've been driving to these boys. Sometimes you don't play well but you can still win by fighting and running and chasing and being aggressive. That can also be a success."
Those appeals to 'how things used to be' were echoed by other former players, too, including John Aloisi, Mark Schwarzer, Mark Bosnich, and Robbie Slater; players who, like Arnold, developed their ideas of what it meant to play as Australians back when players had to "fight and scratch and do whatever you have to do" to get paid, let alone get points.
Because on the other hand, Arnold is ushering in a new generation of young Australian footballers: players whose understanding of the game, of themselves, of the nation, and of what it means to play for it have changed in the two decades since the "golden years".
They're a group who haven't reached the illustrious club heights of their big-name predecessors; a group who are no longer big-money-makers or household names. They're a group who have been asked to keep alive a century of something that they have not been part of for very long.
History is, of course, a powerful motivator. But so too is the fear of not being able to live up to it.
For some, Arnold's harking-back to the past in recent weeks was seen as a different kind of medieval shield: a defence, a deflection from the football-specific issues that arose as the performances of this new generation of cobbled-together Socceroos began to wane.
Australia's final two group qualifying games against Japan and Saudi Arabia in March exposed the problems plainly: flat and conservative in possession, too reliant on outdated athleticism and physicality, too dependent on certain patterns of predictable play, lacking multi-dimensional goal-scoring options and technical attacking midfielders, unable to improvise or create something from nothing.
Their performances, in other words, did not square with the kind of identity or character - the "Aussie DNA" - that the Socceroos, in Arnold's words, were supposed to represent.
They seemed, more than anything else, afraid: to take risks, to experiment, to be brave. Afraid, ultimately, to fail.
And who could blame them, with the weight of such history hanging like a millstone around their necks?
But then Peru happened.
And something changed.
Fear transformed into fight. Uncertainty morphed into determination. Hopelessness became hunger. Doubt gave way to belief. The identity and character that Arnold had been appealing to was made manifest for 120 minutes in Doha.
Perhaps it was by virtue of exactly all that had come before it: the mounting pressure, the lack of faith, the fading hopes, the fear of not living up to the past.
The Socceroos were not just the underdogs against the people on the field: a spirited Peru side from a continent Australia hadn't defeated in over a decade, buoyed by 15,000 travelling fans in full, rapturous voice.
They were also underdogs to the thousands of Australians who turned on their televisions expecting to watch the dull, exhausted whimper of a Socceroos team crushed by the weight of their own history.
What they got, instead, was a group of players who refused to be so.
From the opening minutes, Australia played beyond themselves; beyond the team we thought they were. But at the same time, they played exactly how we've always wanted them to.
They fought, they scrapped, they chased, they harassed. They suffocated Peru with a kind of collective national willpower, resulting in the South Americans registering just a single shot on target all game.
Granted, the Socceroos didn't manage much better in that sense (two shots on target), but there was something in the way this group of men worked for each other that made us believe in them again; made us believe that something special could happen.
And so it did, thanks to perhaps the most decisive moment of the match; the moment that showed that this team has finally climbed out from the shadow of its own past. The substitution of captain Mat Ryan, the team's most experienced player, for Sydney FC goalkeeper Andrew Redmayne, who made just his third ever appearance for Australia today.
It came from nowhere. Even the other players didn't know it was going to happen. Redmayne and Arnold and the goalkeeping staff were the only ones in on it. It shocked the fans, it shocked Peru, it shocked the Socceroos themselves. It was brave, it was a risk - it was something Australia under the conservative Arnold haven't been known for.
And it worked.
Redmayne's unexpected appearance - coupled with his untraditional, dancing preparation style that saved the final penalty and saw Australia win 5-4 - was the moment the Socceroos had been waiting for: a final reminder that they are not beholden to what has come before, but are capable of doing something different, something daring, something truer to who they are now, and still achieve greatness.
As young penalty scorer Awer Mabil said afterwards:
"We want to create our own chapter. We obviously know the history that Australian football has [with] the Golden Generation; we'll always be compared to that.
"Now, it's time for us to write our own future; our own script. The next goal for Australia is we're going to qualify directly. For me, as a player, it's been shit that we didn't qualify directly [this time], but we're going to do that next time. That's the motivation for the younger generation.
"We always do it the hard way as Aussies but now it's time to change that picture and make it easier. That comes with hard work."
This is a team no longer shackled to their past; no longer burdened by the crest emblazoned on their chests. Finally, they have been freed from it. And the future, for the first time in years, has never looked so green and gold and bright.
