Is he perfect? Yes, says one teammate. "You know what, he literally is the perfect human," said Jake Stringer. "He's so nice. He's too nice. It's almost sad, how nice he is. It's like, be in a bad mood for once." Tom Liberatore agrees, in his own affectionate way. "He's not that good at footy," he said. "He's got a horrible hair cut. He's pretty ugly; big schnoz. He is pretty shy with the girls, he needs to find a good woman. But he's a good Italian boy, like me."

The Bulldogs spoke to a long list of people, while trying to work out whether Bontempelli was the player they most wanted to pick at No.4 in the draft three years ago. His parents. His coaches. His home room teacher at Marcellin, and even the librarian. Their answers were all the same: he was friendly, respectful, well spoken. A listener; an optimist. "They were glowing," said Simon Dalrymple, the Bulldogs' recruiting manager. "All of them. And we did a fair bit of work."

There was something else they needed to know, though: whether all that pleasantness was matched by the desire, drive and determination he would need to become the player he looked like he could be. Dalrymple suspected he did; he had watched him play, after all. He had also played cricket against two of his uncles on his mother's side, and knew them to be tough, unrelenting competitors. Those were some of the things he came back to, after interviewing Bontempelli himself.

"His last game for the year was a fascinating one and it's become a big lesson for our recruiting team, because he had a shocker. He got tagged, he didn't handle it well, then we spoke to him a few weeks later and the way he was explaining it didn't match up with what happened in the game," Dalrymple said. "He wasn't making anything up, he was just cliches, and when we said to him 'OK, have a look at this vision', and showed it to him, you could almost see him start to think, 'wow, this is fair dinkum'.

"It was a lesson for us because his answers weren't great, but being tagged was new to him. He'd had no help and it had never really happened before. We had to put some context around it and go back to his body of work, and what did come through with him was how much he cared. He had a real desire to want to get better and you see it with him now, he does all the one percenters. He didn't want to be good, he wanted to be really good."

He still does. But for reasons he did not know, back then. Bontempelli arrived at the Bulldogs with no real idea of what he might be able to achieve in his first few years; he had to get started before he could work all that out. He barracked for Richmond as a kid, and knew very little about his club's story when he got there. But the more he has found out the more he has wanted to know, and the more he has felt like part of something much, much bigger than him.

Bontempelli likes it when supporters tell him how things used to be. He watched the Year of the Dog documentary with a group of his teammates. He calls his club's past players servicemen and when he meets and talks to them wants to know how their passion for the club began and then grew. Every time he speaks to one of them, they seem to remember something new.

"When you get drafted you're happy to be part of any club. But as soon as you get there you want to become part of the club and feel like part of the family and that's one thing I'm grateful I was able to experience early in the piece. It didn't take me long to feel like this is my club and for us to feel like it's our club," he said.

"You come here and you meet past players, you meet long-serving players, you meet all the diehards and the fans. They're the fabric of the club and they're the history, really, just talking to them and seeing them around and working out for ourselves what the identity of the club is.

"Of course you come in wanting to develop and learn and be as good as you can be, but it's a different thing when you start to really care about the club and what it's been through and what the people who come before you have experienced over time. You start to understand why you're really doing it and why it matters to people and why the things that we do mean so much to them."

That's this week, but all the ones leading up to it, too. "Life is a balance and so is footy and I'm not going to say we owe it to ourselves this week, but we've put ourselves in a fortunate position and it's not just us who have contributed to that, there are so many people over so many years who have done that," said Bontempelli.

"That's how I feel. When you get drafted, just playing footy is the biggest thing and the most important thing in your life. Now, playing footy for this club matters more. That might sound like a cliche or it might not make sense. But that's how it feels to me."