CARLTON began the second half of last Sunday's match against Collingwood with Brendan Fevola and Setanta O'hAilpin in its forward line and 78,000 people watching. The Blues were ahead. That's right. The Blues were ahead.

Melbourne is a different place when Carlton's good. You start seeing the old Lygon Street swagger. This club, after all, has won as many premierships as any other in what is now called the AFL. Carlton knows what it is to be a power but, for the past few years, the Blues have known the multiple humiliations of poverty.

Then they got Dick Pratt as president. Then they got Eddie's chief executive at Collingwood, Greg Swann. Then they got Chris Judd. They made the right choice with Brett Ratten. There is a fundamental honesty about him that the best coaches have to have since they must be believed. And there is one other thing Carlton has — what Shakespeare called a "shag-haired villain". Fev.

Carlton's first goal of the second half came when Setanta led for the ball, got his long angular form into the air, drew two defenders then saw the Sherrin drop straight through his arms. Waiting on the ground was Fev. He grabbed it and was gone like a kid with a stolen apple.

Open goal square, bang! And then he did this other thing right in front of where I was sitting on the fence. He ran past and blew the crowd a kiss, but that is a poor description. There was enormous vigour in the gesture. It was the act of a man saying: "Watch me!" and, in response, I heard something I haven't heard for a few years — the mighty Carlton roar.

You sensed they were not going to lose this one. The Pies were like a car battery that had gone flat. Nothing started them, nothing got them going. Two young champions were on display, Travis Cloke and Jarrad Waite. Two young champions.

I look at Cloke and see a premiership, I look at Waite and see a Brownlow Medal. The noise when Waite cut off a Cloke lead, coming across from the side to mark in front of him, was like the sound of a tide coming in.

Their young talents, Marc Murphy and Bryce Gibbs, were showing their wares and for the first time in what seemed like years, Carlton looked like it knew what running to attack means as distinct from merely running — deft overlaps that bring the ball thundering forward in a wave, the last kick, the one to the leading forward, plotted and executed by Heath Scotland, a beautifully balanced deliverer of the ball on either side of his body.

Carlton promptly scored another goal and you sensed that the mountains of thought and effort that have gone into resurrecting the Carlton club were finally beginning to work the only place it matters. On the field. With 78,000 watching.

Judd is the Blues' great player, no doubt about it. That Judd and Fevola play in the one team demonstrates the intellectual spectrum of our game. I see thought in everything Judd does, as well as moments of breath-taking skill.

He produced one at a boundary throw-in, taking his tagger wide, then running back into the space just as the ball arrived. He collected it like a waiter, one-handed, patting it in front of him, all the while evading would-be tacklers.

For sheer impromptu skill, it was rivalled only by Collingwood's Leon Davis, who arrived at the fall of a ball from the back of a pack with his opponent half a metre behind. Davis took the ball as Judd did, one-handed, patting it in front while he brought it under control.

Then, with the boundary line fast approaching, he snapped it back over his left shoulder for a goal.

To appreciate the skill, you have to appreciate the speed at which the game is now played. It is faster than ever before. Maybe in the high-speed world we are entering, a footballer's career will end at 25?

Maybe that is why the Magpies were flat last Sunday? How many weeks in a row can you run as if your life depends on it?

But the game's hero was an old-fashioned one. It was Fev. He kicked seven. Jonny Wilkinson, rugby union's goal-kicking ace, would have been proud of the last, executed from a standing start on the boundary.

Fev again ran to the crowd, his pleasure and excitement making his big arms spin like windmills. By this stage, he and the Carlton fans were pretty much delirious.

The club's longest losing sequence was about to end but, no less significantly, it had been done with flair by a team that suddenly looked as if it knew how to win.

Such was the tremendous excitement that Fev, who has been known to argue with umpires while the ball dribbles past his boot, flung himself into a pack, brought down one man heroically, brought down another, tore the ball from the arms of a third and handballed it into the path of a teammate who kicked the sealer.

For one moment last Sunday at the MCG, Fevola was Hercules (and who is to say Hercules never got into trouble between performing his prodigious feats in Ancient Greece, and had a piss outside the local taverna, etc, etc?). Of course, the problem with Fev is that you don't know what he will do next week. You would not bet the global economy on him.

Carlton won, that wonderful old song was played. I would beg those involved with the 17th and 18th AFL licences to listen to the older club songs before inventing their own.

Some recent additions to the AFL club song book are awful. Carlton's comes from a silly old love song, Lily of Laguna, but it is truly a song and on Sunday it sounded grand.