The morphine had well and truly taken effect, dulling the pain from his leg that only minutes earlier had been broken in three places. Parker knew as soon as his leg buckled underneath him in a tackle that he was in strife.

"I felt the ankle and foot get caught and go the wrong way," Parker recalls of the tackle from Magpie Taylor Adams that put him out of the finals. "You get to the point where you feel the initial pop and break.

"Once we pushed on that spot there was a bit of crunching going around, so we knew."

Thankfully, the break was to the smaller bone in his leg, the fibula, and not the tibia, but it was still a "significant" injury, requiring the insertion of a 15cm plate to fuse the bone. The plate will stay there permanently. For Parker, the prospect of missing out on the September action finals was more concerning than any pain from his leg.

"The adrenaline's up, they got me on the morphine pretty quick - that put me into another world which was good," Parker says. "I think the game had finished and I was just getting into the ambo, I found out that we had won. I haven't missed too much football so you're thinking about missing football."

There cannot be a worse time for a footballer to be injured than during finals, but as disappointed as Parker was he could see the bigger picture. Gary Rohan missed the best part of two seasons with his broken leg, while Alex Johnson has not played since the 2012 grand final after multiple knee reconstructions.

"When I look at my injury compared to what those blokes have gone through it's pretty insignificant, it is a setback but it happens," Parker says. "At the time I had a hope I'd get back but that was something that kept my mind in it.

"I thought I was a chance but ... it's probably a better thing in the end I didn't play at the end of the season. I probably wouldn't have been up at the performance level and I might have let the team down, holding someone's spot who could do a better job as I hadn't played for six or seven weeks and was a bit underdone."

It proved the correct call. Parker was still running with discomfort at the start of preseason. Although he had been able to complete five and 10-minute runs on the beaches of Bali during his holiday, that was much different than going full tilt at training.

"I hadn't done too much sprint work or change of direction, that stirred it up a little bit," he says. "Your muscle size compared to the other leg is still a bit underdone. I still had to build that up but it was something we had to monitor. My body had to get used to having the plate in the leg and being a little bit different.

"It's a significant injury, it's a big break and still only three months after I had done it so I didn't expect to come back and feel nothing."

Parker was still able to complete three months of preseason which meant he did not start the season short of conditioning. In fact, there are few midfielders who have started the year hotter than the Swans midfielder, who has polled 19 of a possible 20 votes in the AFL Coaches Association player of the year award.

"It's only two games," he warns. "I'd love to string a whole season together."

The team he has come back in to is vastly different from the side that night against the Pies. Familiar names such as Adam Goodes, Mike Pyke, Rhyce Shaw are gone, replaced by youngsters such as Callum Mills, Tom Papley and George Hewett, all of whom are keen to forge their own paths.

"It's an exciting time at the club," Parker says. "Each time you get a young guy playing his first game there's a buzz around the club and the boys get a lift from that. The club has changed a lot but our values and leaders haven't."