It was draining. “There were a few of us in that position, always talking about it and trying to think of ways to make sure everyone around us was playing with some belief, playing with some self-confidence and feeling like we could win,” Rivers said. “That was kind of the job as a leader, even if we weren’t really sure we could win, to make sure we were building some confidence in each other. Here, it’s different. Here, you never have to ask yourself, ‘Do we think we’re going to win?"

Here is Geelong, the club that has made him think completely different things. When the Cats asked him to play for them at the end of 2012, Rivers did not question why they had chosen him or whether he was good enough to fit in there. It had become clear to him at the start of that season, when he was part of the leadership group replaced by a much younger crew, that what he had been doing at Melbourne did not count for as much as he hoped it had, even though he played in every game.

Plus, it was Geelong.

“I was ready for a change. Which was hard to realise and to say, but I was,” he said. “And I was probably more excited about getting the chance to play for a club like Geelong, to think that a team that’s been so successful for such a long time wanted me to play for them.”

It was only once he got to the club that the questions began to form. A knee injury that lasted longer than he thought it would, tearing the middle part of his season out, didn’t help. But before and after, Rivers wondered whether he was doing enough, whether he was doing what his new teammates needed him to do. Was he fitting in? Should he be doing more? Was he even good enough?

That he was thinking so much about it was a problem in itself. “That’s something I wasn’t used to doing. I’m a fairly laid-back person most of the time, and it was going through my head for most of last year,” said Rivers, who at least had someone to talk to about it: Andrew Mackie, who he had gone to high school with in Adelaide, before the 2002 draft sent them in different directions.

Mackie, and Geelong’s other senior players, gave him the reassurance he needed. “The leadership group brought me in, in the end, and said, 'You’re an important part of what we’re doing, we need you here, we want you here and you’re doing the right thing'. I probably needed that and I think the players might have seen a bit of that in me at different times last year,” Rivers said.

“I was just in a different spot than I was at Melbourne. At Melbourne, I was a leader and one of the older guys for so many years, and to come to a successful club where everything is so well organised and so established, you just wonder whether you’re doing enough to make sure you fit in.

“I was thinking about it a little bit too much and this year I’ve focused on keeping things simpler, not thinking about what everything means so much, but just going out and trying to enjoy playing footy. I knew something wasn’t right because I never normally think about things that much, but this year’s been different, and playing more games has helped. You start to get your confidence back. I guess it just shows it doesn’t matter how old you are, adjusting to a new club can take time.”

This year, Rivers has felt better about things. He has played in all but a couple of games, starting to feel like he knows more instinctively what the players around him in the back line will do. He has settled into his routine, driving from Port Melbourne to Geelong each morning, “making more phone calls home to my family than I’ve ever done before”, and starting to plan his wedding. “I think my job’s to check in every couple of week and make sure there are funds in the bank account.”

The wedding is in December, by which time one of Rivers’ groomsmen, James Frawley, could be his teammate again. He is one of a handful of Melbourne players Rivers still catches up with, and a reason why last week’s game against the Demons felt so strange. “It made me feel a bit nervous, more than anything, because I didn’t know what to expect, what it would be like,” he said. “In the end, it was just footy. But I’m glad it’s over and done with. I can’t say I enjoyed it.”

Rivers is not sure what Frawley will do, with the Cats one of a few clubs interested in the free agent, but knows his decision will be tough, “because he’s a very loyal person and if he does go, then that will be hard for him. We haven’t talked about it too much, but he’s big enough and ugly enough to work out what the best thing to do is. And that’s the thing with free agency. People worry about it, but for players like me who aren’t superstars, at least you get the chance to have some control and make a decision for yourself, and experience something new before you finish up.”

For Rivers, that has meant getting to know what something fairly simple feels like - winning, He did it 20 times in his past four years at Melbourne; at Geelong, he has played in 24 games for 18 wins.

“It’s funny, in my first game for Geelong we beat Hawthorn and the other guys were looking at me strangely, I was so excited about it,” Rivers said. “Even throughout the year, I almost got too excited when we won games of footy and had to pipe down a bit. It’s expected here, we go out there every week thinking, ‘We can win this game; we should win this game'. As hard as it was to leave Melbourne after so long and what we'd been through, I’ve really enjoyed that. As a player, you feel grateful to come into a team that feels like that, and it makes you want to help the team hold onto that for as long as it can.”