Cripps knew bits and pieces, before this Friday afternoon reunion. He knew he was rushed to hospital and taken straight into intensive care when it happened six weeks ago. He knows he spent the next three days in a coma and that the doctors had to take his wife aside and tell her there was a strong chance he had suffered brain damage. He has been told the heart attack was most likely caused by a virus, but has a small defibrillator sticking out the side of his rib cage, just in case. A few Saturday nights ago Anthony Parkin came around to see him and when the Port Adelaide recruiter started telling the story he couldn't stop. "I said too much; I'm sorry," he called to say on his way home, but Cripps wanted to know all of it. He wants to connect the dots, to understand what happened and how it happened. "The hardest bit for me has been not knowing. I can't remember anything and because now I'm walking and talking and breathing, I keep having these moments where I think about it and wonder what everyone else went through."

It started 22 minutes into the run, maybe even a little earlier. Cripps met Parkin and Michael Regan, another member of the Port Adelaide recruiting team in the lobby; they were in town to watch Vic Metro play Western Australia in an under-18 championships game later that morning. As they walked down towards the track Cripps said he wanted to take things easy, to chat and catch up on a few things. The list manager hadn't been feeling the best – he thought he had some sort of bug – and told them his heart rate had maxed out for longer than usual during a recent training session. "How hard were you going?" they wondered, then and in the next few days. "The quote was: 'a bit of a blow-out'," Parkin said.

They still ran at a good pace, smiling and saying hello to a woman they passed, picking up some speed towards the end. On the way back they overtook Geoff Parker, the Port Adelaide recruiting manager, who was out for a walk with Matt Clarke, Blair Hartley and Luke Williams, three Richmond recruiters staying at the same hotel. Had they left five minutes earlier or not walked as far, they would have already been back in their rooms. Had it not been the middle of the national championships, not all of them would have been in town. Regan wasn't meant to be there either; he had only asked to come along a few days earlier.Cripps was quieter than usual but that only seemed obvious later, too, and neither Regan nor Parkin thought much of it when he dropped down into a squat and told them he'd see them back there. Parkin kept going, wanting to push through five kilometres, but Regan ran only a couple of hundred more metres before spinning around, seeing the woman with both hands on her head and sprinting back around the bend.

The woman had called her husband over and he was there by the time Regan got back; he thought Cripps' back might have gone on him, but it was much, much worse. Cripps had fallen forward, his mouth was filled with dirt. As it turned out the man was a doctor, and he rolled Cripps onto his back. He was still breathing at that point – or trying to – and Regan's first-aid studies kicked in as he tried to wake him. "I was shaking him, trying to rouse him," he said. "And then after 10 seconds the doctor said, 'I've lost his pulse'."

They got to work, the doctor pumping his chest and asking Regan to get started on mouth-to-mouth. Two ladies walking by stopped, one helping out with compressions, the other placing a rolled up jacket under Cripps' head. Once Parkin realised what was going on, he ran for the others: they can still see him literally leaping into the air as he reached them. Williams didn't know the doctor was a doctor, and he hadn't met Regan before. But he knew first aid too, and the right questions to ask. As the doctor started to tire and looked up for someone to take over compressions, he jumped straight in. To everyone else he looked calm, and confident. On the inside there were nerves. "Perhaps I don't show it, or show it in a different way," he said. "But you've got a task you can stick to in a moment like that. That made it easier for me."

Time felt like it had slowed down – like it had almost stopped – even though there was so much happening. On the phone to triple-0, Parkin felt frantic. This wasn't anyone; this was Crippa. "We're packing the ambulance as quickly as we can," he was told. "You're not packing it fast enough, you need to hurry up!" he said. He felt like he wasn't doing enough, but he barracked: come on Jason. Breathe. F---ing breathe. "To have him screaming and yelling like a madman," said Regan, "meant you didn't stop."

Everyone could hear sirens from about two minutes in, but it took somewhere between 12 and 15 minutes for the first ambulance to reach them. To Regan the noise was, in one way, comforting. It meant help was on the way and that the things they were trying to do might not be completely futile. It would have been worse to have heard nothing. What worried Regan was that he couldn't see Cripps' stomach rising like it was meant to. He was almost regurgitating the air instead. "It was his eyes, his mouth and everything about him," he said. "The thing that made it most real for me was his eyes. His eyes went." The doctor had a timer going and as it ticked over 10 minutes everyone started to feel more anxious. "We were all getting a little bit jumpy," said Williams, "thinking 'it's got to get here, it's got to get here soon'."

One problem was that they were in an out-of-the-way spot, unsure how the ambulance would find and get down to them. Clarke, Parker and Hartley split up and headed for three different spots, thinking they could help by hailing it down. Parker went to a nearby car park, aggravating an ankle injury on the way. It's going to need some surgery. Clarke ran to the hotel car park, bumping into another Power recruiter, Chris Drain, and Hartley headed towards the highway. Before they took off he bent over to feel for a pulse and when he turned back around he was thinking: that's it; we've lost Crippa. "He was white as a ghost and he goes, 'he's ice cold, he's dead'," Parker said. He was thinking: he can't be dead. He's 38; he has three kids. "But I looked at him and thought: Yeah. OK. I don't know what I said. I don't think I said anything."

The first paramedic got there and went to work: quickly, calmly, methodically. Two other ambulances arrived from the opposite direction and Cripps was given a shot of adrenalin and two shocks with the defibrillator. He had a little more colour by the time he was loaded into the ambulance, as well as a raspy breath. They had to move him quickly because he was starting to fight. The effort the paramedics had gone to gave Williams some hope, and he felt like he was going to live. His worry was: what state is he going to be in? Others weren't as optimistic. It was the eyes that got to them; they were still so vacant. "I thought we were never going to see him again," Parker said. "I got in the other ambulance and said to the bloke, is he alive, is he still alive? And he goes, 'mate there's a heartbeat there, but it's pretty weak'."

It was hard to know what to do from there. There was a game to watch, which seemed like the most pointless thing to do and the best possible distraction, even if only for 20 or 30-second patches. Regan ate his way through eight chocolate bars; Parkin can't remember anything after the first quarter. Halfway through the third term Hartley looked across and saw Clarke close his notebook: he was done. They had support: recruiters can spend more time around each other than people at their own clubs, at the same games, on the same flights, at the same grounds and the news had spread around Subiaco quickly. "It was good that we were all there together, but it was impossible to focus on anything," said Clarke. "The game didn't really seem to mean all that much." By the time they all flew to Adelaide that night they still weren't sure their mate would make it. "I just stared out the window," Parkin said. "I saw every cloud."

Parker stayed at the hospital, unsure what was going on. It wasn't until someone came to see him 40 minutes later, to tell him Cripps had been taken off for some tests, that he knew he was still alive. He sat there thinking 'I don't want to ring Penny ... someone has to ring Penny ... I don't want to ring Penny,' speaking to Cripps' wife once he knew he was alive and when there was some sort of news to pass on. By then Keith Thomas, the Port Adelaide chief executive, had been in touch and she was on her way to the airport for what felt like an impossibly long flight. Two of Cripps' best friends, Daniel Healy and Justin Peckett, weren't far behind and Port's football manager Chris Davies was on his way, too. Drain stuck around to pick him up from the airport, and to make sure Parker had some company.

Penny's father was with her, which helped enormously. He was so calm, so positive. He kept saying it was going to be OK. But before she left she told Millie, Jody and Jazzey their dad was sick, that he was in Perth and that she was going there to get him and bring him home. "Why did I say that?" she kept asking herself. "It was all I could think about for the whole four hours and 20 minutes. And then when the plane landed I got really nervous," she said. "I didn't want to turn my phone on, because what if there was bad news?"By the time she got to the hospital, Cripps was in an induced coma. It was frightening: almost every part of his body was covered up, there were tubes everywhere and he was anything but out of trouble. The doctors tried late that day to take him out of the coma, but it didn't go well at all: he had to stick his tongue out and wiggle his toes, he couldn't do either and it was difficult to watch. It was like his brain wasn't talking to the rest of his body, and that's when Penny was told of the real possibility her husband might not ever be himself again. "They took me in and started talking about brain damage, and out of all the things I thought I'd be told, that had never even come into it. It probably should have, but it didn't."

Again, all she could think of was their nine, seven and five-year-old children. While he was in the coma she kept talking to him about them: come on, wake up, we've got to get home to the kids, "and he knew I was there". It wasn't until Monday that the doctors could try again to turn down the drugs – they were held up after he developed pneumonia – but the second time was far less stressful and much more successful. Cripps could follow instructions, he wasn't convulsing, he didn't need to be restrained and he looked so much more rested. For the next few days his short-term memory was no good – he would ask Penny what had happened, then ask the same question five minutes later, wondering how on earth he had ended up in hospital – but by day six or seven things were starting to sink in and he was begging for his phone and walking laps of the cardiac ward, frustrated at having to wait several days to have the defibrillator put in.

Cripps has been home for just over a month now. He is still stiff and sore, getting so tired some afternoons he needs to take a nap. Millie has made him a small pillow that sits perfectly between his scar and his left arm, helping him sleep a little more comfortably. He's gone from training hard five days a week to seeing his short walk to collect the kids from school each day as an outlet, and knows it will take a while for his confidence to come back. The first time he went outside after he flew back home, he walked to the park with the kids. He had his phone in his pocket and wondered whether he needed to tell his nine-year-old daughter what to do if anything bad happened. "It was going through my head the whole way, but we walked there, we went home, nothing went wrong and the next time was a bit better," he said. "In my mind I'm just thinking, how am I going to run again, travel again, do everything I was doing at work? I know I will but I'm just thinking, when?"

He will learn more when he sees a specialist next week, and Cripps is going to ease back into work. He will keep talking to a few managers but can't see himself watching any footy until the TAC Cup finals, and won't travel like he normally would to sit in on pre-draft interviews. The other guys can take care of that and he has had a good conversation with Thomas about taking time out to think when the temptation is to go, go go. By the start of next season he hopes to be back to where he was but as a footballer he once spent three months in bed after hamstring surgery and this feels very different. "With the hamstring, it was all about getting back to play footy again. I was 23 and I was driven and focused and my career was my life," he said. "I knew what I had to do and there was a plan to follow and steps I had to take. This feels more unknown."

At least most of his questions have been answered now. Cripps called the doctor who helped him last week and it feels right, "in a kooky kind of way," that it was the Richmond guys who were there with him and his team when they needed them so much. Clarke and Parker have been friends for years, Hartley worked with Parker at Port Adelaide before going to Richmond, Cripps became the list manager after he left and he and Parker even spoke to Williams a couple of times, hoping he might work for them. The last Power game Cripps can remember watching was the one against the Tigers.

It was strange, to hear them talk about what had happened, to listen as they were speaking, piece it all together in his own mind and understand what everyone had done under such enormous pressure. It made him feel a little numb, and wonder what he would have done had it been him. Had it not been him needing help. "I look at them and they tell me they're fine, but I think are you, really? I don't know how they can be, but maybe they do feel all right because I've come through it and I'm going to be OK and the things they did saved me. I just keep thinking about what it would have been like and to hear them talk about what happened, it sounds weird but I feel like it's given me closure," he said.

"I understand everything that took place, I understand the severity of it, I know how lucky I am and I know what everyone did. Now it's just about getting better and getting back to life like it was, but I'm just so grateful. I keep thinking, what else can I do or what else can I say, but that's the only word I can think of. There's a connection there and maybe it's something that's going to be stronger now, but I'm just hoping those guys know what they did and how much it means to me. I hope they know they saved my life."