Returning to footy this year, he said on Wednesday, had been like reuniting with a partner who had cheated on him. "I love the game, but it doesn't feel the same to me as what it did," he said. His staff and fortification was that he had stayed true to himself, all the way through to the moment he knew footy literally had sped past him. "The worst thing you can do is lie to yourself," he said. So he retired.

Footy did deliver Watson his first dream, to play for Essendon, and to succeed his father, Tim, as captain. But it did not deliver him a premiership, indeed only one lonely winning final in 15 years. Unavoidably, this is set against the three pennants won by Tim, the juxtaposition made by Jobe himself on Wednesday.

Footy did deliver him three best-and-fairests, a couple of all-Australian guernseys and a Brownlow Medal - and then took it away again in the fall-out of the miserable supplements scandal. Watson being Watson, he returned it to spare a discomforting moment for whoever would have had to ask for it back. Too much is made of where the medal now physically resides. The record books tell the tale. Watson said on Wednesday the medal never mattered as much as the respect of those he respects. He feels he has retained that.

The supplements scandal gouged more from and out of Watson than any other episode. It took the gloss off fully a third of his career, as he noted on Wednesday, and eviscerated one year of it altogether. It turned the captaincy from honour to cross, since it fell to him more than any other player to put a face on a calamity. Coupled with his Brownlow, it made him an outsized target for boo boys everywhere he played.

It changed him as a person, he said on Wednesday, causing him to second-guess himself and look twice at friends. It left a "bitter taste", his choice of words. He was not fishing for pity, but answering a question the way he always has, without artifice.

Watson's culpability, as a player and elder, what he did know and what he should have realised, whatever oversight or neglect, has been dwelled upon as minutely as George Pell's. I would say you need to know Watson and what makes him tick only a little to accept that he would never deliberately have cheated. Whatever wrong he and his teammates did, a far greater wrong was done to them. The price of that betrayal was levied on Essendon the club, but it was the players who paid it.

The conceit of a footballer remembered for what was lost rather than gained is mine, not Watson's. His wont is to count his blessings, some football, many not. In footy terms, also culinary, he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, but the game did not come to him on a silver platter. His first game was a celebrity event. He found it frighteningly fast then, and again now; such is footy's life cycle.

For some years, he stalled. He was slow - they would spot him five minutes in time trials, he said on Wednesday - a mediocre kick and far from footy fit. The effect was untidy. "He looked like a bag of spuds with a piece of rope tied around the middle," Robert Walls memorably wrote. Sensing that his son might be crushed by duty, Tim told him him he did not have to play footy, but should throw himself into it if he did.

A trip to Japan in 2006 to inculcate leadership widened his horizons and became a turning point. Still, as late as 2007, Kevin Sheedy would have traded him, only to be shipped out himself. Watson said on Wednesday that he and Sheedy had been mysteries to each other: Sheedy could not understand his indifference to his talent, he could not understand Sheedy's riddles!

At any rate, Watson knuckled down. You sense that he submitted to what he described on Wednesday as the selfishness necessary to succeed at elite sport. It remains a puzzle to his girlfriend, Virginia Slaghekke, a New Yorker. His fitness improved, his appearances at the heart of contests doubled, his kicking lengthened and he willed himself to become one of the first rank of midfielders. Time after time, he got the ball and gave it; he was the Bombers' pulse. He was still scruffy, but scruffy by now was fashionable.

Watson peaked in 2012, as the volcano rumbled. Over the next three years, some of the joy receded from his game, and then last year the game itself disappeared. He said on Wednesday he could understand the unabating hysteria, but that made it no easier to live it. The year off broadened his perspective. He spent most of it making a new life in New York, to which he will now return. For a time, it had not been clear that he would come back at all this year.

It had been important to return, Watson said, to reassure himself that Essendon, his Essendon, were alive and well and would outlive the infamy of recent years. That was clear. But the game had moved on, literally at Essendon, a club abounding in the one asset Watson never had, blinding pace. He found it was swirling around and past him. "I wasn't able to do things I used to be able to do," he said. "It's a great game to watch, but tough to play." Next year, he will happily watch.

History's verdict on Jobe Watson will be like a WADA case, a drawn-out process. Unlike WADA, it is likely to be sympathetic ultimately. Considering what the game withheld from him and what he gave it anyway, he deserves to take an honourable bow.