When Richmond and Carlton kick off proceedings for 2021 at the MCG on Thursday night, the ground will, by necessity, be only half-full. But even the sight of 50,000 people in the stands will be remarkable.

The corresponding clash last year was played behind closed gates to a backdrop of deathly, eerie silence, not a club-coloured scarf in sight. That would become the norm at all Victorian grounds.

Indeed, after five rounds of a season first abbreviated from 23 rounds to 18, then postponed for three months, there would be no games in Victoria at all and a grand final played at the Gabba in Brisbane.

For AFL supporters based in Melbourne who roll up at games faithfully each week to watch their teams, Thursday night has been a long time coming. Just ask Richmond fans, who pre-game will watch as not just one but two premiership flags, from both 2019 and last year, will be unfurled.

And it's not just Tigers who are buzzing. Even crusty old cynics for whom the game is a living.

For the best part of four decades, I've been rolling up to grounds like the MCG and Marvel Stadium two or three times a weekend to write and talk about AFL football.

But when I walk through the gates on Thursday evening, it will be for the first time since September 28, 2019, after having watched Richmond destroy Greater Western Sydney in that season's grand final.

That's just on 18 months ago, the longest spell I will have had between visits to the "G" since I was a little kid in the very early 1970s. And if I'm this excited about a return to an old stamping ground, imagine how the rabid flocks of fans of both the Tigers and Blues will be feeling in the lead-up?

It strengthens the sense that if (fingers crossed) the arrival of a COVID vaccine and encouragingly low numbers of transmissions does make our lives more normal in 2021, it's the true diehard fans of AFL football that most deserve the good times.

The AFL did a sensational job to even make the 2020 season happen. It still has an enormous job ahead repairing the enormous hole the pandemic has left in the game's finances. But no less important this year will be to ensure that it lets the game's supporters know just how much they are valued.

That is a concept to which the league has regularly paid lip service but on which it has also sometimes failed to deliver. As fans begin to reconnect with the game they were largely separated from last year, the AFL really needs to walk the walk to ensure their loyalties don't wander away more permanently.

Access to their teams, their favourite players and, obviously, the actual games, has become harder for footy fans in the modern era. But encouragingly, the signs on that score have been good so far in 2021.

The documentary series "Making Their Mark", released last week on Amazon Prime, is a pretty good example.

With the full cooperation of the AFL, its clubs, coaches and players, film crews spent the entire 2020 season following a host of key participants, the likes of West Coast star Nic Naitanui, Carlton's Eddie Betts, GWS skipper Stephen Coniglio, Gold Coast coach Stewart Dew, Richmond leaders Brendon Gale and coach Damien Hardwick.

Boiling down countless hours of footage even into a seven-part series of hour-long episodes would have been a monumental task. But the filmmakers did it brilliantly.

The result is a look inside not just the routines but thought processes of virtually everything that happens in the AFL environment, with nothing off-limits, players and coaches alike miked up even in their lowest or angriest moments, and most dramatically, during the games.

We see Coniglio in tears as he is told by his coach Leon Cameron that he is being dropped from the team. We see Betts dealing with the fall-out of ugly racism with which he's coped his whole career.

It's certainly not for the faint-hearted or those easily offended by bad language, as one memorable spray from Hardwick to his Richmond players at three-quarter time of a game against Fremantle underlines. I counted nine "f bombs" in 10 seconds alone.

But as a real window into what makes football tick for the people who support the whole exercise, the supporters, the AFL hasn't delivered a more significant document. You'll struggle to get closer to the game than by watching this epic production.

Yet even that isn't actually being there. And for hundreds of thousands of footy fans, that hasn't been the case for a long time. Until Thursday night, a year-and-a-half since it was last possible to walk through the MCG turnstiles, sit in the stands and watch two AFL teams go hammer and tongs.

That is what will make this particular season-opener so special. And like a little kid counting the minutes until a special occasion, I simply can't wait.