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Duchene scored two goals and had an assist, helping the Colorado Avalanche beat the Carolina Hurricanes 4-2 on Friday night to match the best 10-game start in team history. Dane Swan was an old-school footballer, a one-off in the modern, professional context. His method of preparation came from the 1980s, with a barrel of beer on Sunday mornings and no sleep on a weekend full of trawling in the night clubs.His indifference to training (at least on the track) is legendary at Collingwood, although he would smash 500-metre runs on the treadmill in the altitude room at the Holden Centre when no one was watching, so he could run taggers off their legs on the weekend.He had no interest in watching his edits with the line coaches on a Monday and not much love for the tactics and numbers that swamp the game now. He ran with a waddle and his kicking was problematic (although ironically, he would rarely miss when near goal).When he arrived at Collingwood at the end of 2001 at the bargain pick of No. 58 in the super draft, he had just completed a week of drinking at schoolies on the Gold Coast, and was fearfully hungover. Famously, he had declined the clubs offer to fly him home early to join training, preferring to stay with his mates, revealing a pattern that stayed with him to this day.Nothing about him suggested he could become what he did. But in time, Collingwood learned that if you put a footy between him and an opponent on match day, he would most often get it. In that sense, Swans greatness is simple. He ran to the ends of the ground like few others, and he could find the football (27 times a game over his 258 game career). Later, they realised that he could mark overhead and kick goals and that on big occasions, he was nerveless, a great match-day performer.It was an impressive package, and his record speaks for itself. Three Copeland Trophies (and four other top-three finishes) through a period when Collingwood won a flag, lost another grand final and was generally thereabouts, a Brownlow Medal, and an AFL MVP award are not to be sniffed at. He has a claim to be in top 10 Collingwood players of all time, along with Nathan Buckley, Bob Rose, Peter Daicos the Coventrys and Co.As Mick Malthouse has observed, his game spoke for itself, and he never needed to shout about it. In fact, Swan perpetrated a con act on the football world over mmore than a decade, convincing it that he did not care for the game.dddddddddddd The unchanging facial expression, the deadpan commentary on a rare occasion when he appeared in the media, they all were part of his cunning plan. The Illusionist one newspaper headline writer called him a few years ago, and it was spot on, although over time, people woke up to how good he actually was.Swan never took himself too seriously, never pretended the game bigger than what it was. Once, he loaned his Brownlow to a mate so that he could surprise people by showing it, and for a time, did not know where it was. To him, family and friends came way before football, and he sought means of expressing himself, mainly through his tattoos.Nothings ever my fault - just ask my grandparents, he observed at his retirement media conference at Collingwood on Tuesday, a production in itself.His sporting hero was Allen Iverson, the NBA superstar who popularised full-body tattoos among athletes a decade or more ago, and who had endured a brush with the law that was all too familiar to Swan, whose Federation Square fisticuffs with some security guards in 2003 almost cost him his career before it had really started. By the time he won his Copelands he was painting himself with tattoos, one of the first of Australian sportsmen to do so, and among the first was the Swan family motto: CONSTANT AND FAITHFUL. Later, he had the words G-o-o-d L-i-f-e inked on his knuckles. He bought a tattoo shop, and a pub, still giggles at the irony of those particular purchases, and called his clothing label Rat Bagg.Then before he could blink, he went to the SCG in Round 1 this year and Zak Jones of the Swans fell hard on him in a marking contest, Swans right leg twisting up underneath him. An hour later he was sitting in a medical room at the adjacent Sydney Football Stadium, waiting for an x-ray and wondering where his future was. Collingwood were smashed in his absence. Soon enough, the medical reports would come through.It was the end of an entertaining road. Thats footy. Thats life. ' ' '