Tom Hutchesson’s draft night story is such a good one that you may well have heard it before now. In case you missed it, this is how it goes.

When we chose Tom with the very last pick in last November’s draft he was in the air, somewhere between Paris and Doha, waiting until he knew the draft was over before logging on to use his one free hour of wifi.

He and his partner Natalie had booked their four-and-a-half week trip to Europe late in 2018 with no reason to think it wouldn’t be an ideal time to get away. Tom hadn’t started playing for Adelaide’s team in the SANFL then, let alone started playing well enough there for the draft to be anything other than an absolute dream.

He didn’t really think he would be picked up. He was 24, after all, and had spoken to just us and the Crows throughout the year. Still, he checked the time, checked it again, logged on to the internet and, with Natalie asleep in the seat beside him, watched his phone start flashing with message after message after message.

They were from some numbers he knew and even more numbers he didn’t know, arriving so quickly that he had trouble scrolling back to the top of the list. When he got there the first message was from the draft room. It was us, asking when he would be getting home.

“I’d been thinking about it a bit. I was thinking about it that night, before we got on the plane, but I was thinking it would be the rookie draft on Friday, if anything was going to happen. I thought that was my only chance,” Tom said.

“I was shocked when I turned on my phone. It just kept going ping, ping, ping, ping, ping. Messages, Facebook, people sent me screenshots. There would have been 150 texts, so I read to the top and there was one there saying 'welcome to the GIANTS'.

“Nat was asleep, so I tapped her on the shoulder, woke her up and just showed her the phone. She couldn’t say anything, she just looked at my phone, then looked at me, then looked at the phone again.

“For the next 14 hours home I was just sitting there thinking: 'we’re moving to Sydney'. Nat was crying; I was crying. I felt really proud. That whole trip back, there was just a lot of emotion. It was a good time to have, just us two taking all of it in.”

It was the last thing Tom would have expected to happen when the Crows called him at the end of the 2018 season, inviting him to play for their SANFL side as a fly-in, fly-out top-up player.

He had tried his luck in Adelaide once before, moving from his small town of Millicent to the city when he was 17 but missing out on making the South Australian under-18 side that James Aish, Matthew Scharenberg and Luke Dunstan played for in 2013.

He moved in with some mates, started a full-time job and played some under-18 and reserves games for Glenelg. But after a while it started to feel like his footy wasn’t really going anywhere. He had a job as a carpenter lined up back in Millicent. And he liked living there. So at the end of his second year there, he headed home.

Things were different this time last year, though. Tom had just finished his best season ever, winning a premiership with Millicent as well as the league best and fairest. He had never played better footy. Work was going really well, and he and Nat had a home together. He still liked living there. Still, when the Crows called, he realised he really wanted to give it one last shot.

“I spoke to a few people and they said you have to give it a crack,” he said. “And I already wanted to. I feel like I’ve just been developing over the years, playing better footy year by year. They asked me to come down to train and I thought, ‘yep, I want to give this a real go’. I knew it was going to be different this time.”

Still it was an unusual year. Tom made the team for their first trial game and it was there that our SA scout Tyson Bourke first noticed his speed, agility and toughness, playing in the midfield and forward line. He met his new teammates the night before that game.

Rather than move back to Adelaide, he flew in from Mt Gambier the day before each game and stayed with a mate, flying back home afterwards so that he could be ready for work first thing Monday morning.

He noticed that his game almost suited the state league better than the country competition: he could use his speed more, not get knocked around as much as he was back home.

“I love playing for Millicent,” Tom said, “but I started to notice that the quicker the footy was, the easier I started to fit in.

“My mindset at first was, ‘I’ll give this one year and if nothing happens I’ll come home and nothing has been lost’. But I know people have been picked as mature-agers. So the more the year went on I thought, 'you know what, if I have a good season this might happen'.”

People wanted it for him, too. Tom’s boss didn’t want to lose him but when we spoke to him in the lead-up to the draft made it clear what an honest, reliable, hard worker he was. He said he wanted footy to work out for Tom, but that he would keep his job open forever for him, even if it meant waiting years. It was a good endorsement.

From there it was a matter of which draft picks we ended up with. We knew the Crows were the only other chance to call Tom’s name out – no one else had spoken to him – but that was only one piece of the puzzle.

Had we taken just one pick early – rather than trade up to make sure we got both Lachie Ash and Tom Green – then the last of our four picks would have come earlier than 65, and other players higher on our list might still have been available. Doing those trades to inch up the order meant we wiped out all our draft “points” from this year and part of next, generating two more picks, which we needed to use to fill out our list, at the end of the draft order.

The Green bid coming at 10 helped us move a third round pick from 2020 into this year’s draft, to get Jake Riccardi. That left the last pick for Tom, who ended up being the very last player picked up in the draft.

He was 24, but he had never been part of a full-time football program. He had attributes that we liked – the speed, the agility, the tough streak. Things have come his way quickly in the last 12 months, but we liked his nature, the way he had embraced the things that had come his way, how hard he liked to work and how quickly he had come to be loved by his teammates at the Crows.

He got home almost a day after he was drafted. He drove home to Millicent on the weekend and by Monday morning was back on a plane, on his way from Mt Gambier, to Melbourne, to Sydney. The thing he thought might happen really has.

“My whole life has changed, pretty much,” he said. “It’s daunting, but here I am. It’s been a long wait but I get to give it a go.”