Her two older brothers, Phillip and Snap, were one team. She paired up with Shane O'Brien who lived a few houses away. Shane O'Brien had the ball on a string and he and Deb beat her older brothers. She wasn't allowed to play if she cried so she didn't cry and, playing on the road, there were plenty of grazed knees. But she could always read where the ball was going next and, from the start, she loved to tackle.  "Street footy moulded me into the footballer I am," she says.

She was good at all sports, including athletics, but she always had a footy in her hand.  Her father John has a slightly blurred photo of six-year-old Deb after her first game. It was touch footy, he recalls. Once you were tackled, you had to let go of the ball. As soon as anyone went to tackle his daughter, she handballed over their heads and collected the ball on the other side. Leesa Catto, a long-time worker for women's football, describes Deb Lee as a ferocious competitor. "She was as hard as nails. She wasn't the most gifted, she had no left foot, but she had great drive."

Each Saturday during her teens, she went with her father – Johnno, as she calls him – to watch the Bombers. Her favourite player was small, nuggety Tony Buhagiar. "He was in and under," she says. She doesn't use more words than is necessary and the full meaning of her words often comes from the grin which accompanies them.

At 15, she was playing in the National Women's Basketball League with the Coburg Cougars. She enjoyed basketball but it wasn't her passion. Then, in 1991, the father of a friend found an advertisement for a women's football team in East Brunswick inviting new players to training. She and her friend Motsi went along.

"I didn't expect girls to be very good. I hadn't seen women play. There were these women kicking both feet and hitting targets. Motsi said, 'I'm not getting out of the car.' But I did. First match they put me in the middle. Ball went up, I took possession and I got the biggest tackle. I thought I'd been hit from here to China, but I was glad of it. I thought, 'So this is what it's all about.' "

In 1993, at the age of 19, she went to the western suburbs and started her own team – Sunshine YCW. For their first game, they played "in t-shirts with sticky-tape numbers. The boys from the club came along to support. They set up an outdoor spa and started drinking beers. By three-quarter-time, you can imagine what that was like".

Over 21 years, she played 304 games and won the Helen Lambert Medal, the women's Brownlow, five times.  She did her ACL joint twice and was reported once. "It was just a jumper punch. I regret it now but at the time I had a lot going on in my life." She was a tough footballer but she remembers one tougher, Ronnie Rumler, from the Ballarat Lions. "If you saw her coming, you got out of the way."

She has her share of funny footy stories, like the day her team was short of numbers and she asked a friend she calls Keller to play. Keller turned up "in high shorts and painted nails". Deb assigned Keller the job of running with the opposition's best player.  "Wherever she goes," said the coach, "you go with her". Came the moment in the match when she couldn't find Keller anywhere on the ground. There, in the opposition dug-out, was the star player with Keller sitting beside her.

On her mother's side, she is descended from former VFA club Brunswick star Willie Carton. On her father's side, she is descended from Harry Lee, Essendon club secretary in the Bombers' premiership year of 1942. Deb Lee duly went into administration as a club president and as president of the VWFL. She worked at the Western Bulldogs as community manager and is now in that role at Melbourne Football Club.

Leesa Catto believes it is no coincidence that Lee has worked at the two AFL clubs that have made women's football part of the annual AFL fixture. The Bulldogs and Demons' women's teams play as a curtain-raiser to the men's match at Etihad Stadium on Sunday. The return match, on August 16, will be televised by Channel 7.

Deb Lee, who is seven months pregnant, says she doesn't want other young girls feeling embarrassed about being footballers like she did. When she played football alone in Parkstone Avenue, she often hid when cars came.  "To say you were a footballer was to invite judgment."

She describes football as her university. "It's the place I learnt about life. It teaches resilience, it teaches you how to listen and be part of a team." What you see in Deb Lee is someone who has got enjoyment and satisfaction from the game. What would she say to any young woman contemplating playing footy?  "Come on the journey."