"I'm the best bridesmaid going around," Nick Stevens says, after polishing off a hot chocolate in the lead-up to his 200th game.

Carlton's vice-captain is talking about his three runner-up placings in best and fairest counts over a career that has spanned 11 years because, despite his obvious talents, Stevens has never best judged his side's most outstanding at the end of a season. There have been other, more significant, near-misses for him, too - a premiership (by fewer than 12 months) and club captaincy (twice in two years).

But this week, Stevens is exuding a kind of optimism that has been rarely seen, or at least rarely widely believed, out of Carlton players in recent years. He's spruiking even - saying that the Blues, woefully down and out for much of his time there, are capable of playing off for a flag within the four- or five-year period he thinks he has left in the game.

Port Adelaide did just that, and won, in 2004, a season after Stevens controversially walked out on the coach - Mark Williams - he still rates as the best he's played for.

Five years on, Stevens splits his senior footy experience 60-40. Much of it has felt enjoyable, successful and fulfilling. The harder times have almost exclusively been at Carlton, Stevens' arrival to which coincided with the bleakest period in the club's history. It wasn't exactly what he was counting on.

To Stevens' mind, it was Denis Pagan, a man he says he respects but whom he also called to be sacked as senior coach last year, who stood in the way of him being named Blues skipper at the beginning of 2007. Lance Whitnall got the job and then got the chop. It was in considerably brighter circumstances that Stevens was overlooked a second time - Chris Judd, with not a senior game to his name in the navy blue, got the nod ahead of him on the eve of this season. Stevens was disappointed again, but having just been delivered a midfield sidekick of blue-ribbon class, hardly had grounds for complaint.

The serious neck injury that Stevens says led him to seriously contemplate an early retirement late last year has given the 28-year-old a new perspective. The various trials of footy wash over him now like they might not have before. Fat jokes included. And there have been plenty directed his way of late.

With hand on heart, Stevens says he did not even look at the unflattering image of him that ran on the front cover run on (START ITALS)The Age's(END ITALS) sport section in the first week of April this year. But he's well aware of the score. And the accompanying article, which reported that Carlton's coaches had questioned him on an apparent weight gain, was baseless according to the man in the middle.

"It was a cheap shot," Stevens says.

"It seems when guys when have a knee reconstruction, they get a year's leeway to play good footy. The coaching staff were really happy with me and they kept saying to me, 'It's not an issue'. I'm the lightest I've ever been now and I'm in the best shape of my career. Ratts (coach Brett Ratten) said to me yesterday, 'You look a million bucks, I've never seen you look this good'.

"I'm never going to be one that's ripped like a Nathan Buckley. But I look at someone like Michael Voss and his body shape throughout his career. There's been a lot of good guys who are like that. You look at Luke Hodge, Jordan Lewis, these sort of guys, it's the same thing. Some people just can't get it and that's the way it is. It's genetics."

Stevens is currently 86 kilograms and proud. It's a good 10 kilos lighter than he was after the six-week lay-off he required following the season-ending injury he struck in round three last year. Most people, Stevens says, do not understand how precarious that all was. The delicate neck surgery he had, which involving replacing a shattered disc with a piece of bone from his hip, had the potential to leave him paralysed. Which is why, having got through an extended and mostly tedious rehabilitation period, Stevens makes no apologies for being seriously out of shape when the Blues launched their pre-season regime late last year.

"I don't think Ratts knew at the time how close I was to giving it away," he says of the chat he had with his new coach last November.

Stevens could not see himself progressing, and even the three-year contract the Blues had only recently offered him, which he also signed, seemed irrelevant.

"When you have an operation like that, you think bigger than footy, and I guess it puts life into context - there's kids and there's family and stuff like that," Stevens says.

Ratten told him to imagine coming out the other side and how satisfying it would feel when the team did. It's exactly where Stevens thinks Carlton is now and he can't remember feeling better physically in his entire career than he has in the past fortnight. His enormous running capacity is nearing its peak again, and in the second half of this season playing alongside Judd, whose explosive skills he describes as "cat-like", Stevens believes he can play the best football of his life. But while noting that he didn't realise just how good the former Eagle was until he played with him, Stevens counts Ratten - not Judd - as the greatest factor in turning the place around.

"I think it's uncanny how similar Brett Ratten is to Mark Williams. I think in time he'll end up being the best coach that I've ever had," Stevens says of his fourth, and youngest, football chief.

"I've learnt as much off Ratts in the last 12 months, even when he was an assistant coach, as I have in my whole career."

Those who have worked with Williams say his most striking trait is his ability to teach. Publicly, Stevens' professional parting from his former mentor appeared highly acrimonious, but Stevens does not hesitate now in saying how fond he was of him. Williams, he says, treated him like a son.

Ratten has been trying to emphasise with the now firmly established player that being best on ground and the team's highest possession winner - measures Stevens previously marked himself on weekly - is not nearly as important as the midfielder believed it was. Ratten likes to demonstrate the hows and whys of the game, and if Stevens rang him at 10pm with a question, he says his coach would drop everything to come around to answer it if he thought it would help.

"I look at Ratts and he's the coach, but you look at him as a good mate, too.

"You go, 'This is a bloke that I want to play for and I want to go into war with'. If I was to go into war, I'd want Brett Ratten standing next to me . . . it's been a long time since we've had that at the Carlton footy club."

Which leads us to Pagan.

"Personally, we probably didn't have a great relationship, it's fair to say," Stevens says of the man who steered the Blues for four-and-a-bit seasons up until round 16 last year.

"But as a player and coach, he could tell me what needed to be done and I'd do it. And I could speak to him and say, 'I don't agree with this', and he'd take it on board, so there was a mutual respect thing.

"He was set in his ways and I respect Denis for that because he did it his way and he lived and died by what he did. I think he had a great game plan for finals footy but nowadays, you've probably got to have two or three game plans to win games.

"To his credit, and good luck to him, he won flags like that and he had a very successful side (in North Melbourne). He probably just didn't have the players at that time (with Carlton) and was a little bit old-school."

When Carlton's leadership group was summoned before the club's board of directors for a specially convened meeting late last year on then-president Graham Smorgon's boat, it was Stevens who spoke most frankly. He said categorically that Pagan should be sacked.

"If we're bad people for standing up and saying that we thought there needed to be changes, well, I can live with that," Stevens says now, with the critics of former skipper Anthony Koutoufides following his post-retirement tell-all book clearly in mind.

Stevens also admits that being overlooked as Koutoufides' replacement compounded his disillusionment with the coach.

"I never really got a good reason why. Denis just said he went with Lance Whitnall and that was his choice," he says.

"That was a tough one because Lance and I were best mates . . . and I was rapt for Lance because he'd gone to hell and back, I knew what it meant to him and he'd been a great servant of the club. We still joke about it now and say how we would have loved to have been joint captains."

The next bridesmaid moment came on the eve of this season.

"Ratts sat me down at the time and said it was borderline, that it could have gone either way," Stevens says of what was a two-horse race for the captaincy between him and Judd.

"He said the players voted on a leadership group and I got as many votes as anyone in that. With the coaching staff, he said basically the only thing it came down to was that Juddy is a premiership captain.

"Although I was disappointed at the time, I look back at it and think I still play a big role in the team and I still am happy where I sit with the boys and the coaching staff. I think they respect me a lot and that's the biggest thing for me."

Stevens is respecting himself a lot more nowadays, too. Once a regular, self-confessed, binge drinker and night owl, he says that in the summer leading up to his round-one comeback match this year, he permitted himself to drink alcohol on only three occasions. This moderate approach - a stark contrast to previous years, when Stevens says the Blues "partied as hard as anyone" - has extended to the players. Three or four drinks are had after a win now, he says, instead of 10 or 15.

"I think that's where we've turned the corner as a club.

"It's about picking the right time and making sure that your body's right. That's what I've done."

Close tabs will be kept on whether Stevens' body, even with its genetic particularities, continues to stay right because it has become one of the more scrutinised frames in football. But with several imposing performances already on the board this year and his best apparently yet to come, Stevens doesn't seem to mind a bit now.

"There's nothing greater when someone gets into you than having them eat their words," he says.

"And I think that's what a few people have to do, and I'll keep trying to make them eat their words for the rest of the year and the years to come."

If he walks his own talk, Stevens might become a bride yet.