The question takes Max Gawn, 249 games into one of the great AFL careers, by surprise.What has his life in footy given him but, also, what has it taken away?“I haven’t been asked that, probably because I haven’t retired yet, but I think 250 games is a good chance to talk about it,” he says in the lead-up to his milestone match against Carlton on Sunday.“I’ve always thought when AFL players snub the press conference on retirement, I’m like, ‘come on, the game has given you a lot’.And the game has given me a lot.“The game’s given me everything I am currently, really.

I still think I’ve been my own person throughout it, but I am attached to being the Melbourne Football Club captain, and that has given me a lot of inroads in life.”Gawn stands in rare company.No player has more than his eight All-Australian blazers.He captained Melbourne to the flag that ended a 57-year premiership drought.He won a poll on radio station SEN last week voting him the best modern ruckman, ahead of Simon Madden, for the achievements in his esteemed 17-year career.

“Has it prevented me from doing anything?,” he wonders out loud, pausing, before chuckling to himself.“I gave up drinking with my 21-year-old mates.I would do that again.I gave up having a dart when I was 18.I would comfortably do that again.

If you’re able to be yourself while doing this high-performance sport, I look back and I go, the game hasn’t taken anything away from me.”If commitments to physical improvement and ruck craft are main components in the recipe of Gawn’s success, authenticity is the not-so-secret ingredient.He is admired as an elite athlete, but loved as a cycling-obsessed, bar-owning advocate for footy-mad Melbourne – even its suffocating AFL bubble.He has pursued his own path of pilates since his late 20s, which he believes has added at least 50 games to his career, and is a passion shared by his wife, Jess, a physiotherapist and pilates teacher.“Being able to find the healthy balance is the key,” says the man famous for his towering frame, shaved head and distinctive facial hair.

“But yeah, if I didn’t like walking to a cafe and talking footy, I probably wouldn’t have a beard,I’ve decided to go down this path, and there are times where I wish I could get a coffee and not talk to someone, but most of the time I’m pretty happy because I love Melbourne, I love the city,”The Demons’ travails have tested the patience of even their most ardent fans,Now 34, Gawn has lived them: the elation of a breakthrough premiership and his individual accolades contrasted with the pain of injuries, on-field failures and club trauma,Some have, briefly, driven him away from the game.

“I’ve been angry at the game and tried cold turkey, and you spiral even more,” he says.“And I’ve been completely in love with the game and searching Melbourne Football Club on Twitter to see what everyone’s talking about, and that’s unhealthy as well.”Despite it all, Gawn keeps coming back.“I actually find that one of the key factors in performance is your love for the game,” he says.“Some of my teammates, good friends that have been delisted or retired or didn’t end the way they wanted, fell out of love with the game on their way out, and I just don’t want that to be me.

“There are times that it tests.The club’s been through a fair bit of adversity over the last three years, and you don’t want to watch the footy or you don’t want to read the paper, but I make myself do it in a way that I know that I love it.”By way of an example, he cites how he grew up loving Friday night football.By July in a long season he understands it can lose its lustre, and patience can be worn thin by football’s personalities.But he says he will still switch on, if for no other reason than to connect with the love he had as a child.

“If it’s the commentators I can’t do, maybe put them on mute, but make sure you find what it is that you love about footy.”Gawn appears from the outside as the well-adjusted one, able to handle the AFL spotlight as well as anyone.He has a loving wife and two kids, his own hard-working parents he admires, a breadth of off-field interests, and the ability to perform at or close to his peak for the past decade despite all the mania of Demonland.When Clayton Oliver faced personal issues, it was the spare bed of his captain where he slept.Gawn says he uses a range of techniques including journaling and meditation to ensure he is the person he wants to be.

In a 30-minute interview, the phrase “healthy balance” is used six times.But when it comes to football, Gawn can’t seem to get enough.He has injected himself into the AFL news cycle with a twice-weekly slot on radio station Triple M.PR people for the network then clip up his hottest takes and push them around the sports media ecosystem.Tuesday’s subject line of the email read “Max Gawn reacts to taunting of teammate Harry Petty: ‘I didn’t like it’”.

Gawn says the gig can increase the pressure on him, given he is usually asked to comment on the most controversial issues in the AFL, even those involving him or the Demons.He is not yet convinced a future in the media is for him.“It is something that I wanted to see if I’m interested in, it’s a space that I think I could get into, so why not give it a crack while I’m doing it to see if it’s something I’m really passionate about? I’m unsure what the answer is yet, but I certainly enjoy going on Triple M.”In conversation with Gawn, “unhealthy balance” comes up once, too, in the context of mobile phone use.“An unhealthy balance is someone that can’t be on their phone and deletes social media, and I think that’s unhealthy.

So I think ‘healthy’ is being able to be on social media, but having a healthy balance of being able to put your phone away.”Gawn says he tries to be disciplined with his phone.He loves social media, and its power to connect him to the athletes he loves, like New Zealand’s cricketers or the world’s top cyclists.It also connects him to his own fans, allowing him to leverage his reach to work with brands like Lululemon and pilates company Your Reformer.“I appreciate what social media is, and I appreciate the role that I play in it, but it’s important that I have a healthy balance of it.

You don’t want to be caught on it too much.”When he lived at Blairgowrie, on the Mornington Peninsula, in the years after Covid, he had a ritual before he entered his house.He would put away his phone and dunk his head under the water at the beach, to wash the noise of the football world away.“As a dad in particular, you can see how present you are when you’re off your phone compared to when you’re on your phone,” he says.Now living in Glen Iris, he has a new routine.

“Mental health is the buzzword in football at the moment.It is extremely important in society and football.And it’s something that I take incredibly seriously to myself.I have a routine, and the routine seems to work for me.“Every night I’ll put my phone down and make sure I go for a walk.

I’m very lucky, I’ve got a park across the road.I take my shoes off, walk over on the grass, and just do a few laps of the oval.”