St Kilda’s infamous romance has finally gotten to Ross Lyon in his emotional Saints return

“When I left, I dropped an iron curtain,” Lyon, who quit as Saints coach in 2011, mused after the reunion that has occurred over the past 10 days.

“When I spoke about that moment, I got very emotional and it unleashed a lot of memories.

“It validated how I felt about the club.”

Lyon, whose hard-nosed rationale almost single-handedly ended the roller coaster trajectory of footy’s least-winning club, had been seduced by the thing that keeps Saints supporters coming back each year.

Of all the AFL clubs, St Kilda seems to tug at the heartstrings most.

Just one premiership in 150 years, won by a single point in a now bygone era.

A history of brilliant players spooked by ill-discipline, ill-management, ill-luck and periods of the most chronic mediocrity in the league.

Twenty-seven wooden spoons sum up their on-field struggles. It took until their fourth season to win a game in the VFL/AFL.

‘Big Carl’ Ditterich, Tony Lockett, Nicky Winmar, the St Kilda disco, Molly Meldrum, the 22.5 cents in the dollar payment scheme and the notorious Moorabbin mud. St Kilda’s history is littered with a tragicomedy of the sublime to the ridiculous.

The Saints were footy’s flawed geniuses. Many fans have accepted their ill-fate and worn it as a badge of honour.

As the Saints were centimetres away from an elusive second premiership in 2010, rocker Tex Perkins sat willing a win but wrote of the conflict in his mind.

“I had this strong sense that all the things that we built our characters on would be gone. All that culture of adversity and struggle was going to be wiped clean. We’d be just another team that has won a couple of premierships.”

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Not all St Kilda fans are as masochistic as their rockstar ones. Those Saints were built to win and so nearly won it all.

Lyon came in and moulded his young stars into a system of discipline and predictability.

Whereas St Kilda had once enjoyed and tolerated the offensive excess of its champions, defence was king.

Mantras like ‘Saints Footy’ and ‘St Kilda Bubble’ entered the footy lexicon. The most famous Ross-ism, ‘Let the cobblers do the cobbling’, summed up the cult-like devotion he had from his players.

It was his way of saying he would control what he could control, but it was symbolic of his notion of system over stars.

Infamously, he rested arguably his six best players – Nick Riewoldt, Lenny Hayes, Nick Dal Santo, Brendon Goddard, Leigh Montagna and Sam Fisher – for a late season game against Hawthorn in Tasmania in 2009, and still came away with the win.

Soldiers in, soldiers out,; result the same.

Lyon demystified the star complex that plagued St Kilda for much of its modern life.

No ultimately flagless team has come as close as Lyon’s Saints, with their narrow Grand Final loss in 2009, then draw and defeat in 2010.

Under Lyon, St Kilda went from romantic to pragmatic and had its most sustained success in years.

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Lyon’s exit from St Kilda only hardened that reputation.

Resigning to take a rich four-year deal at Fremantle was seemingly a cold-hearted business decision. He was gone in the night, unclouded by what he had achieved, and nearly achieved, with his band of players.

Saints fans bled about that for years.

When Brett Ratten was first sacked, the idea of Lyon coming back was bandied around on social media with humorous tones. As if that would happen…

But quickly, it became clear that it was deadly serious. By Monday, nobody was surprised when Lyon Mark II emerged in a St Kilda polo shirt at Moorabbin.

There were little signs before, though.

A reunion with his St Kilda players of the era on social media triggered fond reminisces. Saints icons like Riewoldt, Dal Santo, Montagna and Goddard speak with total admiration for Lyon. There is clearly no ill-will.

They remember the good times, and the continued drought just highlights how good those times were.

On Monday, Lyon warned that he wouldn’t quite be ‘Cuddly Ross’, yet emotion for the club was the first thing he spoke of.

Lyon of yore may have dismissed those pangs; he admitted that he deliberately shut out thoughts about his time at St Kilda for years.

The iron curtain metaphor was classic Ross, but it was perhaps his way of saying that the time away from St Kilda has opened his heart, which has now led him back.

Clearly, his prospects this time around at the Saints look decidedly bleaker. He has a middling team that most pundits think lacks upside, as opposed to the first era when a clutch of blue-riband stars were entering their prime.

But Lyon has let himself buy into the dream of scaling that second premiership Everest. He came so close to doing it with the Saints before. Can the best parts of old and new Ross combine to create some magic?

Just like the fans that turn up for season upon season of disappointment, the St Kilda bug has finally bitten Lyon.

Sixteen years on from his initial appointment, Lyon has swapped pragmatism for romanticism.

Strap yourselves in.