I made the somewhat shorter journey from Launceston to join him and as we were strolling back to Melbourne CBD from Albert Park after one of the practice sessions, I suggested we pop into the MCG for the Sheffield Shield cricket match Victoria were playing against Queensland.

We did just that, paid our $5 at the gate and considerably more at the bar, and duly had an entire tier to ourselves for a few hours.

On Saturday I was back at the same venue, the only differences being about 98,600 additional spectators, no Shane Warne on show, even more expensive beer and a rather more significant sporting contest.

I thought I had seen the G in all its glory. I've been there for big cricket and footy matches, seen the Commonwealth Games athletics and opening ceremony, even finished running a marathon there.

But nothing prepares you for the place on grand final day.

It's like seeing Olivier play Hamlet, Nureyev perform Swan Lake or The Buggles sing Video Killed The Radio Star.

The Boxing Day Test match might argue the point, but in truth the AFL grand final is the MCG's raison d'etre.

It is hard to explain the feeling of being surrounded by hundreds of thousands of people who had secured a view their mates would kill for but who still spent more time looking at their phones.

The scale of the spectacle is also difficult to comprehend.

The AFL published an article on its website last Thursday saying the grand final "will go out to viewers in 250 countries".

This is very impressive, not least because if you Google "number of countries in the world" the generally accepted answer is 196.

Clearly that doesn't take into account the 54 others that just can't get enough Brian Taylor.

Either that or Gillon McLachlan is now so powerful that he can create countries. Move over soccer, you clearly ain't the world game any longer. How long before an Australian Football World Cup? In Qatar of course.

That same number of countries was regurgitated by Hawthorn's sponsor, the Tasmanian Government, which stated: "The grand final is watched the world-over by an enormous audience. Across 250 countries an estimated audience of 20,000 watches."

This second figure is almost as impressive given it is one-fifth of those that watched the game in person and a tiny fraction of the three million or so that watched in Australia alone.

Faced by such unreliable information, it is probably best to just reflect on the contest itself and, after much deliberation, I arrived at the perfect analogy.

West Coast taking on Hawthorn was like Barack Obama trying to take on the US gun lobby.

It was an admirable cause, widely supported by most independent observers, but ultimately the opponent was simply too strong. Just too much influence, too many big guns.

Comparing Luke Hodge to Charlton Heston might seem a little ridiculous, but no more so than an audience of about 60 in a 100,000-capacity venue.

Or indeed increasing the size of the planet by 25 per cent or underestimating a global television audience by 29,980,000.