YOU'RE playing for Carlton in a Grand Final against Essendon, and it’s your last game.

You bag four goals from full-forward - all before half-time on your natural left foot and three of them with the barrel - and you kick half your team’s score by game’s end.

In doing so, you bring glorious finality to your club’s 21-year premiership drought, in the only Grand Final in history where the team triumphs with less goals kicked.

For anyone of the dark Navy Blue persuasion it is, as ‘Bogey’ once said, “the stuff that dreams are made of”. But this was no dream for Brian Kekovich. It was precisely how Grand Final day 1968 panned out for the then 22-year-old Myrtleford recruit, who contributed 4.4 (28) to Carlton’s ultimate tally of 7.14 (56) - three points to the better of the Bombers’ 8.5 (53).

A couple of weeks ago, Kekovich returned to the old Carlton ground for the first time in more than 50 years. He stood by the ’68 premiership trophy in the foyer, sat in front of the No.16 door in the locker room and cast his eye over the verdant playing surface where he, Alex Jesaulenko and Brent Crosswell wreaked havoc up front.

Kekovich’s whirlwind visit from Western Australia (his home for the past 17 years) coincided with a Carlton Life Members Luncheon at Kew Golf Club where he was reunited with his ’68 Grand Final contemporaries John Nicholls, Ian Collins, Peter Jones, Bryan Quirk and Barry Gill - and linked up with premiership players of later years like Ken Hunter and Anthony Koutoufides - at a Life Members Luncheon at Kew Golf Club.

“Ï’m delighted and humbled to be back,” said Kekovich at IKON Park. “At the luncheon I saw people I had not seen for more than 50 years, and met and spoken with players I’ve respected but never met. That was unbelievable for me.

“Walking in I felt like I was playing a game. I was half excited, half nervous, but once I saw John Nicholls I forgot about everything. John Nicholls asked why I left him and I said ‘Í didn’t leave you deliberately, that’s what happens sometimes’.”

Born Branko Kekovich in January 1946, Brian was just two when he followed his Yugoslavian father Vladimir and mother Milica to Australia; the family having spent the immediate post-World War Two years in a refugee camp in the Sinai desert near the Suez Canal. It’s a story not dissimilar to that of Alex Jesaulenko, with whom Kekovich made his Carlton senior debut in the opening round of 1967, earning Kevin Murray as his first opponent.

The Kekovichs initially settled in Western Australia, in the town of Manjimup some 307 kilometres south of Perth, where they found work on a tobacco-growing property. It was there that Brian’s younger brother Sam was born, and a third brother Michael would follow.

Sam would later feature in North Melbourne’s inaugural 1975 premiership team. Michael, whom Brian considered the most gifted of the three footballing brothers, was just 17 when he was tragically hit and killed by a car whilst on a training run in Doncaster in June 1971. All three inherited the sporting genes of their father, a soccer player of renown who first represented the Army in the Middle East and later Western Australia at state level.

In 1955 the Kekovichs crossed the Nullarbor to Victoria, to Gunbower in the state’s north. Brian first kicked a footy at Gunbower State School in 1956 – the same year he joined his Dad on the trip from Gunbower to the MCG for the first time to watch the Games of the ’56 Olympiad. Though a soccer final involving Russia and Yugoslavia piqued his father’s interest on that occasion, Brian homed in on the high jump when Chilla Porter took the silver medal for Australia.

“The high jump finished at quarter past seven at night and in the dark, and my father kept saying ‘Let’s go, let’s go’,” Kekovich recalled.  “That’s when I said to my father ‘I’ll be back here one day’, not thinking that I’d be playing footy with Carlton in ’68 and winning a Grand Final.”

In 1960 the Kekovichs were again on the move, this time to the tobacco fields of Myrtleford in Victoria’s northeast. In time, the oldest boy’s footballing talents in the Ovens and Murray caught the discerning eye of Graeme Richmond, and Kekovich put his signature to a form four guaranteeing that if he was to pursue a League career it would be with the Tigers.

“I played in two practice matches for Richmond, and when I finished high school and the crunch came my name was mentioned at Carlton by Gordon Newton (then a club director),” Kekovich said. “Carlton people came up and did what was necessary, although it didn’t end there. I rang Richmond and gave them a last opportunity, but their budget had run out and that was it.

“It wasn’t huge money, but I was happy with the way it turned out. Delighted actually. I’d played in Richmond practice games and knew Paddy Guinane, Billy Barrot, Mike Patterson, Roger Dean and Ronny Branton who was my coach at Myrtleford, so the connection (with Richmond) was always there. But Royce Hart came out of nowhere and Carlton needed key forwards, so I was happy to go to Carlton.”

At Princes Park, Kekovich quickly found his feet. In an intra-club practice match at Laverton in early 1967 he fared well on the ’64 Brownlow Medallist Gordon Collis, and backed it up in a practice match at Carlton the following week. Come the first round and he was named at centre half-forward alongside Jesaulenko – and he saw Jesaulenko’s genius from the outset.

“I can tell you know that in the first year if it wasn’t for Alex I wouldn’t have got a kick,” Kekovich said. “They all thought I was good at reading the game, but the only reason I was good at reading the game was because I could read what Alex was going to do and he gave me the kicks.

“Alex had an amazing leap off a standing start and amazing pace, and what surprised a lot of people was his strength because he wasn’t overly big. He was barely six foot, if six foot, but he was well-co-ordinated in any sport, not just football.

Kekovich took out the club’s goalkicking honours with 36 in his maiden season and 59 in his stellar 1968. The seismic improvement came in the wake of his omission for the 1967 preliminary final, when Kekovich completed every session through the summer under the watch of a sprint coach.

Kekovich’s marked improvement in stamina, strength and recovery was such that of the 17 of a possible 22 senior games in which he played in 1968, Carlton won all 17, the Grand Final included. Incredibly, he went into the 1968 Grand Final with a secret known only to himself – that for weeks he was labouring with a damaged vertebra at the base of his spine incurred when he fell onto an opponent’s boot in a reserve grade game earlier in the season.

“I lost strength in my legs which affected my strength in my marking, my speed, my recovery, everything,” he said. “I laboured with it because I didn’t want the coach to know I’d be playing finals with half an injury.”

It’s history now that Kekovich and his 19 Carlton teammates - under the watch of Ron Barassi whom Kekovich unhesitatingly declared “by far the greatest coach I ever had” - were part of a truly famous victory on a blustery Grand Final day 1968. In casting his mind back more than 50 years to that day, Kekovich is reminded of the excitement and the relief that he experienced in equal measure.

“I was also exhausted, and I remember saying to myself ‘If I’m exhausted, how is ‘Nick’ (Nicholls) feeling and how is ‘Serge’ (Sergio Silvagni) feeling?’ – all those blokes who’d been running harder and harder than I have, 'I wonder how they’re feeling?’,” Kekovich said.

The lower back injury brought a cruel premature end to Kekovich’s football career (and a career in basketball at which he believed he was even more proficient) – with the 1970 and ’72 Carlton Grand Finals so tantalisingly close. On compassionate grounds he was cleared to North Melbourne to join his younger sibling Sam, and though he kicked eight in a practice match for the Kangaroos the physical duress proved too great for big brother to play on.

Today, Kekovich follows the fortunes of the Carlton players with genuine fervour. As he said: “I can tell you from 4000 miles away how each and every one of them are”.

And he’ll always have ’68.

“I look back with tremendous pride at the fact that we won the premiership,” Kekovich said.

“I don’t look back to the four goals, I honestly don’t. I could have kicked six goals in the first half and I missed a really easy one in the last quarter which would have put Essendon away.

“I only look back that we won the flag. It’s the winning, the camaraderie, the togetherness and the joy you brought to other people. That’s what made that day special.”