HISTORY doesn't repeat, but it does resound. It did yesterday. From 1983, Hawthorn played in eight grand finals in nine years, and a staple of grand final week was Thursday night training at Glenferrie Oval, with the sausages sizzling and peak-hour trains rattling by. It was always Show Day, always a public holiday.

After 17 tumultuous years, Hawthorn is back in the grand final. Yesterday, it was Mulgrave, not Glenferrie, and morning, not night. Instead of trains, there were cranes, instead of concrete terraces, concrete townhouses. This is what has become of Waverley Park, once the stadium of the future, now a suburban development, also Hawthorn's swank new training base.

In 1991, Jeff Kennett was a pretender to one form of premiership, a distant figure in Spring Street, only peripherally identifiable with Hawthorn. In 2008, he is nearly 10 years a former premier, now Hawthorn president and visible and audible everywhere yesterday in a Hawthorn jacket. It might have been Show Day again yesterday, but was no longer a public holiday; Kennett as premier abolished it.

But some things are immutable: the passion, the rhetoric, the smell of sausages and sauce, Peter Knights, Gary Buckenara, Ken Goddard, the latter a trainer who has been with the club since 1962. Less hair and more girth all of them: pre-loved, now re-loved, worth a round of applause each.

About 10,000 came to commune with the Hawks. Many were wearing new jumpers, some so shiny new that the square on the back for the number was still blank. Most, you suspect, will fill it eventually with number 23, another staple. Then, it was the strutting figure of Dermott Brereton, and didn't he know it. Now it is the strutting figure of Lance "Buddy" Franklin, and doesn't he know it.

The size of the crowd appeared to catch coach Alistair Clarkson off guard. He had to force his way through it to get to the arena, creating a stir. Then he had to leap an old dug-out, causing another stir.

But the line from assistant coach Damien Hardwick was as changeless as vanilla ice-cream: this, he said, would be just another game.

Yesterday's session was like proceedings at the Showgrounds, for show. It was too late to train for form, and too open to rehearse tactics. Franklin kicked almost exclusively on his right foot, Luke Hodge kicked on his left, but gently, and Trent Croad, in runners, scarcely kicked the ball at all. But last night, the Hawks named an unchanged side.

Hawthorn in the good old days was famously laid back.

Hawthorn now is the most micro-managed club in the competition; every minute and movement is prescribed. The club's greatest coach is John Kennedy. But when reminiscing with media at Glenferrie on Wednesday, even he was given the wind-up signal.

The Hawks do not apologise; such attention to detail has got them far. Yesterday, as players left the ground, staff waited with pens to expedite the signing of autographs.

But when other staff tried to erect a sponsors' backdrop behind Hardwick, the blustery wind forced them to abandon it. Here, perhaps, was a revelation. Instead of a patchwork of corporate logos, there was in the background a far more compelling image: 10,000 fans.

Two lots of halcyon days were revisited yesterday, Hawthorn's and Waverley's. The fans mostly were clustered on a grassy embankment beneath the grey, fortress-like visage of the Sir Kenneth Luke Stand, the one section of grandstand that was kept when the AFL abandoned the ground in 1991. It serves two purposes now, to house the Hawks and as a multi-storey monument to a dream that was never fully realised.

Extraordinarily, the sky was cloudless, in contradiction of the history of a ground infamously built in a rainbelt, where it seemed always that it was raining at the football, or about to. But, true to long Waverley tradition, it still took an hour to get out of the car park.