Those who didn't think twice about putting on a show to honour Aaron "Bill" Mahoney - who died doing what young blokes everywhere do on a Saturday afternoon, playing footy – soon hit upon the most crucial element of their planning. With so much love in the room, they'd need a bigger room.

"We were gunna do it in Colac, we were expecting to do something with a couple of hundred people," said Adam Harris, a former Otway Districts coach who with his brother Scott and Tony Robertson, the club's most recent past and current presidents, nutted out the details. "We had to reassess."

By the time Bill's Big Day Out finished on Sunday afternoon there'd been much reassessing, all of it for the greater good. A crowd of nearly 800 filled The Pier function centre on the Geelong waterfront, and their generosity marked the most fitting tribute imaginable to someone Harris remembers as a quiet bloke who spoke with his actions, who could not have tried harder or done the little things better.

They'd hoped to raise maybe $100,000 to put in a trust account for Asha and Toby, the children Mahoney and his partner Emma Craddock adored. The final total will be more than double that. "It's very, very overwhelming," Craddock said. "Absolutely amazing."

Sunday was a celebration of a life, but also of a community - in its literal and football guises. After Mahoney's passing Adam Harris rang Luke Hodge, Hawthorn's captain whose Colac roots will never wither. Hodge said he'd make a couple of calls.

And so the crowd - 95 percent of them from the Colac district, who sold the show out in 12 hours - was entertained by virtually the entire cast of The Footy Show, who with MC Mark Howard donated their time. They paid thousands of dollars a time for auction lots - corporate boxes at the footy and cricket, pre-game access to the Hawthorn rooms, a round of golf with Hodge and mates, flown to and from Crown penthouse suites by helicopter.

They'd already given plenty since the tragedy on May 2, and on Sunday they kept on giving. The golf went for $20,000; a raffle between courses raised $21,000 alone.

"It's just unbelievable, we never thought it'd be like this, not at all," said Scott Harris, who remembers Craddock hesitating - as Mahoney doubtless would have - about taking money when there are worthy causes everywhere. "But people want to help," Scott Harris told her.

Sunday's tally will be significantly boosted by the proceeds of "Bill's Bucket", a simple idea that's gone a long way. A bucket, a sticker printed up at the local paper, a template sent with AFL Barwon's help to every footy club in Australia.

They've sat on bars in clubrooms far and wide for the past two months, and people with no connection other than the game itself have emptied their pockets into them. "Everyone knows it could have been their son, their cousin, their brother," Scott Harris says. "It could have been them."

Second-year Geelong footballer Darcy Lang, another local whose junior days with Alvie took him deep into the bush and out onto the Gellibrand Recreation Reserve to play against Otway, echoed the sentiment. As the shockwaves of Mahoney's death reverberated, the Cats pondered what they could do to help. So Lang and Tom Lonergan headed south.

"It was just about taking their mind off things for a couple of hours," says Lang, who took the under-14s for training while Lonergan put the under-17s - Bill's boys, who the 24-year-old had coached the morning he died - through their paces. Their loss hung in the damp air, and stared up at them from the ground; the spot where Mahoney fell in an innocuous tackle was cordoned off with witches hats, adorned by flowers.

They stuck around and took training for the Otway senior team Mahoney captained. Scott Harris says Robertson had already taken a call from "the big boss" ("anything you need," Gillon McLachlan told him). Other Cats retraced Lang and Lonergan's steps into the Otways in the following weeks, as football at the top reached out to one of its own.

"They were superb," Scott Harris says. "What they did actually worked, just by being there ... it broke the thought process."

The Harris brothers were awed by Hodge's contribution to Sunday; Hodge was having none of it, saying they'd done all the work. Yet only Hodge had to bolt out onto the pier before the show started, having taken a phone call from Sam Newman demanding assistance - and coins - to feed his parking meter.

Craddock had never met Hodge before the day. "He doesn't take any credit for it, but without him we wouldn't have had this." The who doesn't really matter, only the why. "It's a country community, that's what they're known for," Hodge said. "Colac, Otway, all through there, it's such a tight place. If something happens even to a friend of a friend, everyone helps out."

Tim Pekin knows this too, just as he knows where Mahoney came from, the place he left behind. The former Fitzroy and St Kilda 200-gamer coached Otway Districts for three seasons, and in 2007 wrote a charming fortnightly column in The Age about this slice of bush that stretches from just south of Colac through Kawarren and Gellibrand, up to the ridge at Beech Forest, across to Lavers Hill where the Mahoney boys went to school, through Carlisle River and the rises and falls of Chapple Vale where they grew up.

"There's a different kind can come out of that area, and they all come together at the footy club," Pekin says.

Mahoney was in his mid-teens when Pekin started coaching, and would play under-17s in the morning and seniors in the afternoon. "He always played better in the seniors because he accepted responsibility really well."

Pekin played him in the back pocket or on a flank, and soon watched him force his way into the key defensive post, taking on the opposition's best forward. "Billy was the youngest bloke in the team, him and [Sydney's] Dean Towers, but that's the responsibility he wanted to take on."

The reaction to his death, the outpouring of a community throwing its arms around those in need, hasn't surprised him. Stand beside "Bill", Pekin says, and he wouldn't say much. But you knew he was genuine. "There's a goodness about a fella like that, and we take them for granted in a way, just assume they'll be there forever."

Craddock hoped the day would help everyone come a little more to terms with a loss no one imagines when footballers young and old, stars and strugglers, lace their boots each weekend. "They're all grieving as well. He meant a lot to everyone, not just me."

She reckons he'd be so grateful for all that friends and strangers are doing for their kids. "It's hard that he's not here, you can't tell him how good it is. But he'll be watching. He'd love to be here."