Boyd learnt so much at GWS: how to live away from home and look after himself, how much harder he had to work, what it was like to feel like just another player on the list trying to find a way into the team. But he was there so fleetingly, not even a full year. Many of his closest friends there have found new teams, too. And almost the second he got to the Bulldogs he felt like he had been there forever. "It's a bit surreal," he said. "It's my old team, but not really. Things have changed so much since I was there."

Boyd was not planning to leave the Giants when he did, at the end of his first season. He was on an Indonesian surfing trip when Ryan Griffen walked away from the Bulldogs at the end of 2013, thinking only about coming back to start training again. The offer was one he could not pass up: it was a long contract, a large one, and one that meant he could move home and be close to his family and friends. But he came back knowing he was the same person and the same player he had been, with exactly the same things to work on. He understood what he was: a talented key forward, the type that can be tough to find. "People forget that circumstances can be the most important thing," he said. "It's not just the person you are, or how  well you're going, and I knew that."

Boyd also knew his decision to leave would not be understood by everyone. It was obvious before he signed it that his new contract would place him under a much sharper sort of scrutiny than he had experienced as a draftee. He has avoided reading about himself where possible this year, and avoided listening to the demands for him to click his fingers and turn from a 20-year-old who had never done a full pre-season into a million-dollar forward, whatever that is. He has a coach he loves, who makes him feel good about himself and is extremely clear about what his next steps should be. He has found himself thinking much more about his team this year, and what it most needs him to do. "That's all I'm really thinking about at this moment," he said. "How can I help us win?"

Other criticism has been harder to ignore. Like the constant stream of Facebook messages, and the particularly mean tweets. Abuse that some days feels harmless, but more often than not is nasty. Boyd thought he was good at separating things in his head, at knowing what he needs to listen to. But it's a lot easier to do that when you're starting out, when all of your news is good news.

"I'm getting better at it. I think most people would consider themselves to be all right at it, but it's not all that hard to compartmentalise when everything's positive, when you're a kid in the draft trying not to get a big head. When I went up to Sydney it was all sunshine and rainbows but that changed almost as soon as I made the decision to come back," Boyd said.

"I knew it would and understood what I was taking on, but the extent of it has surprised me a little bit. Some of it's pretty harmless – the million-dollar stuff – but some of it's just abuse and a lot of it is really, really nasty. You wouldn't believe what some people come up with. That's been harder to get used to, but I think I'm getting better at dealing with it just through experience and exposure. You've got to find a way to not listen to it, because if you let it through then it could become fairly depressing. There's a lot of support out there too, but it's funny how that's harder to hear than the bad stuff. I posted a picture on Facebook about a campaign to prevent male suicide, and I even got abused on that."

What frustrated him was when he invited more of it. By the time news of his altercation with teammate Zaine Cordy became public at the end of June, a few weeks after it happened, Boyd felt as though he had dealt with it. He and Cordy, good friends before it happened and immediately afterwards, had told the club, explained themselves, accepted their suspensions and started doing their best to get back into the senior team. "I'd done the whole cycle of acceptance thing," Boyd said. "I was so disappointed in myself but I'd gone through that disappointment and the anger towards myself and wondering why I put myself in such a bizarre situation. So when it came out in the media, those emotions came back up and I was thinking, haven't we been through all this?"

Boyd describes what happened with Cordy as a "stupid accident," more than anything. "We were out, it was just us, we'd had a fair few drinks and it was a funny one, it was like we were being silly and mucking around and the next minute just got annoyed with each other. We're best mates; we spend all our time together. It was always going to be blown up like it was malicious and like something must have happened or that we hated each other, but it wasn't like that at all. That's the most stupid thing about it."

He knew it wasn't him, and so did everyone close to him. But suddenly they weren't the only people with an opinion, "and that was what I struggled with, that I'd always tried to be respected and known as a person who made good decisions, and then you go and give people a reason to question that, or criticise you and be horrible," he said. "It was hard to fathom the fact that you can build your whole life on certain principles and values and that can all become questioned after one stupid mistake, but at the end of the day we sign up for it and we know it's up to keep making good choices.

"So much stuff came out that wasn't true, and even when people message you with support, you feel like they might be believing the worst of what they read and basing their support on that. To come to terms with that was hard, but it was definitely a good lesson. The important thing was that Zaine was fine, that there was never any malice there, and the club never held it over either of us, they moved on and let us move on knowing that we understood our mistakes. It was strange, I'll say that. If there was something good to come out of it, it was a good character-building experience."

So was something else, which far fewer people knew about. At the time he was suspended, Boyd was out of the team rehabbing a shoulder injury, which he has been dealing with for almost two years and which will need a full reconstruction as soon as the Bulldogs are done. But of much more concern was his father, who had just had a cancer cut out of his lip. "He's OK now. But it was the second operation he'd had, it was quite a significant one, and it was frustrating for him because he couldn't speak for two weeks at all afterwards," Boyd said. "From the day it all went down at the club with me until when it broke in the media his mouth was stitched up, so it was literally the worst timing possible and I know how much he wanted to help me and try to talk me through it. We thought he would be all right so it wasn't stressful in that sense, but it was still a pretty major thing to happen and it was like an avalanche. Everything happened at once, but he's going well now and touch wood he stays healthy."

Boyd's family will be there on Saturday, for his and their first trip to Spotless Stadium since he played for the other club. He left a young team on the up for one in almost exactly the same position and though his memories are hazy is grateful for his time at GWS. "People say to me, did you hate it up there, and I didn't," he said. "It was different and hard and unsettling, but it helped me grow up. You go through so many things for the first time when you get to an AFL club. As prepared as you think you are, you aren't really prepared at all. I went through all those things there, and I don't regret my time there at all."

The biggest difference he has noticed between his old and new teams is that the Bulldogs have history, that the players are part of something much bigger than them and that there are supporters who know more about the club than they could ever read about.

"We've seen footage and heard all the stories and there are supporters who come into the club every week who have been here though it all," he said. "That's what the Giants don't have. There's some time to go before they have their 50-year supporters, so when you compare the clubs like that they're very different places, but they need to start somewhere. There's guys who have been there since they were 17, wanting to create some history and start something. I know how hard they've all worked and what this game is going to mean to them. But I really want us to win and I know how tight knit we are. We've been riding every emotion as a group this year, we're so close and we really want this too. I'm very keen to beat them."