THE last time Col Hutchinson missed a Geelong game, JFK was still US president and Andrew Demetriou was two. Today will make 1100 in a row, and 1160 of a possible 1195 since the first. Seemingly, every one of them is lodged and logged somewhere in his mind.

There is, for instance, the day at Kardinia Park in 1972 when Geelong came from 49 points behind at half-time to beat Collingwood. Ken Newland kicked the winning behind, after the siren, and said he missed deliberately, so to beat Collingwood by a point. There was another post-siren win over Collingwood in 1967. Spectators and mounted police already were on the ground, and some Collingwood players off it, when Bill Ryan at first missed, but after a 15-yard penalty kicked truly.

In 1976, recalls Hutchinson, after a scuffle late in the second quarter, Collingwood's Ron Wearmouth realised that he was a marked man. At half-time, he beat a hasty retreat — up the wrong race! He was, as was Scott of the Antarctic, gone for some time.

Memories of putting one over the Magpies seem to please Hutchinson best. “There is an element of that,” he said. His humour is as dry as a ledger entry.

There are the games he almost missed. In 2007, his flight to Perth was cancelled for a Fremantle match, and the next would not get him there before half-time. At the last minute, he found a seat with another airline.

In 1971, he woke up with the flu. Geelong was playing away to St Kilda, the day was miserable and — pre-West Gate Bridge — Moorabbin was two hours away. Hutchinson went anyway. “Standing in the outer, in pouring rain, watching Geelong kick 3.3,” he remembered. “It was the lowest score I've witnessed.” But his streak remained intact. It sticks in his mind that Jimmy Wright, Geelong's best player that filthy day, wore glasses on the ground.

Hutchinson says he loves football for its spectacle, but also for its unpredictability, which appeals both viscerally and mathematically. “There's always something new to wonder at,” he said. At 67, he might have thought he had seen it all. Then, three weeks ago, Geelong beat Melbourne by 186 points.

This was the moral of the last game he missed. It was round 5, 1963. Geelong was playing Fitzroy at Brunswick Street, and was a surer bet even than any team playing Port Adelaide now. Hutchinson was 19, had the mumps and stayed home on the family farm.

But on a mudheap, the Lions somehow prevailed. It would be their only win in Kevin Murray's two years as captain-coach, but Murray was away that day, playing for Victoria, and missed it. “I learned my lesson,” said Hutchinson, “never to assume certainty in a football match.”

Hutchinson also remembers fearing that Geelong was throwing away a certain and, to his mind, long-awaited premiership; it had been 11 years. The Cats did win the flag, and the prevailing sentiment at the club was that it was the start of an era. “We had so many champion players,” said Hutchinson.

But it would be 44 long, ill-starred — but for him, unbroken — years before there was another. He says 2007 and 2009 made the vigil well worth it. He sees no reason why the Cats can't add another to his collection this year.

Hutchinson was born in Maryborough, but moved to Geelong with his family as a child, and began to go to the footy. Spectators were allowed onto the ground at breaks, and the St Augustine's orphanage brass band played at half-time. The first match he counts was in 1958, when he was 14. It was the last played by ruckman Fred Le Deux. Now Hutchinson watches Le Deux's grandson, Tom Hawkins.

Hutchinson's own post-school football career consisted of one quarter, one kick and one behind for North Ballarat reserves while posted as a teacher to Lake Burrumbeet. It was on a holiday Monday, and Geelong wasn't playing. Thereafter, Saturdays were exclusively for the Cats.

While still teaching, and running a small farm with 20 head of cattle, Hutchinson began to work at the club as a statistician. Coach Rod Olsson was sold on stats, ordering an expansion from four stats men to 20, including one for each player. His job was to count not just kicks, marks and handballs for the player, but the distance, direction and outcome of each kick, and to chart his running, like a human GPS. It also meant keeping tab on his opponent.

It demanded exceptional discipline, to hear the goals but not see them. Olsson even would ask Hutchinson to keep a statistical watch on training. One night, that meant tracking Rex Hunt. It was also fraught. “A player would say: 'You missed something I performed',” said Hutchinson. “Or: 'You regarded my second kick as being ineffective. I dispute that. My teammate dropped it.' ”

Through bookkeeping, Hutchinson grew closer to the club he loved. He formed friendships with Bob Davis, David Clarke and Neville Bruns, to name some. He was in the race at Princes Park the explosive day in 1985 when Bruns was knocked out by Leigh Matthews. Hawthorn fans were howling and spitting, and at length even the genteel Hutchinson could stand no more, punching one whose misshapen face was pressed up against the wire mesh. He broke his knuckles.

Another day, at Moorabbin, apoplectic coach Bill Goggin ordered that no one be allowed into the rooms at half-time. A jobsworth doorkeeper barred even team manager Les Bailey, and would listen to no entreaty. Furious, Bailey snatched paper and pen from Hutchinson, scribbled a note and shoved it under the door. “It was his resignation,” said Hutchinson. “It took the club a week to talk him into withdrawing it.” Bailey is still there.

One Sunday during the 1989 finals, all Hutchinson's hobbies and jobs collided. All three Geelong teams played that day, which meant he was at the MCG, doing the stats, from 7.30am and did not get home until 8pm. Then, he had to load and drive two truckloads of cattle to the Geelong saleyards, half an hour away.

It was midnight, but he was not done; he had lessons to prepare for the next day. After three hours sleep, he was at school. Though dog-tired, he had a plan. “The first thing we did was to sing the Geelong theme song,” he says.

From 1975 to 2007, Hutchinson worked for Geelong as statistician and historian, clocking up an estimated 100 volunteer hours a season. His duties extended, for instance, to manning the leaderboard at best-and-fairest counts. He wrote a history of the club, Cats Tales. He crammed his house with football memorabilia.

In 1992, he gave up teaching to become the AFL's go-to stats man, and still is, but now as a part-timer. He is cheerfully pedantic. “I'm a bit of a fanatic in that area,” he told Cheryl Critchley for her 2010 book Our Footy. “I hate inaccuracies being perpetrated.”

He has never married, and says he is “lucky” that family events have not coincided with football. He lived, and lives, an uncluttered life, “footy and farming” in the winter, socialisation in the summer. His extra-curricular is local history.

So the seasons and the games mounted. In less than two years, health permitting, he will make it 50 years unbroken. It is surely a world record. But the man of records has a niggling feeling that it might not even be a club record. He tells the story of Peter Burns, who played for the club from 1892 to 1902, then was timekeeper until 1941 and died in 1952 and for all anyone knows did not miss a match for nearly six decades.

But for Hutchinson, it was never merely about accumulation. Historically, Geelong's football has been analogous to its geography, a little apart from the rest. This appeals to Hutchinson. “There's always been a tradition at Geelong, going back to the 1860s: adventurous, skilful, playing 'the way the game should be played',” he said. “That tradition has never left us.”

He dates the emergence of modern Geelong from the appointment of Malcolm Blight, whose era was rollicking, though ultimately fruitless. He also credits Frank Costa, Brian Cook and recruiting guru Stephen Wells, but also Wells's mentor, Bill McMaster. Geelong places much store by its family tree.

He rejoices in the speed and athleticism of the modern game, but regrets some of the homogenisation: a narrowing of the range of kicking skills, for instance, which means few torpedoes and no stab passes.

He also rues the passing of man-on-man contests. “You would see the team in Friday's paper. Bob Davis was named on a half-forward flank. For

Essendon, Alec Epis was named on a half-back flank,” he said. “You could go very confident you would see that match-up. Then Ron Barassi came with the idea of shocking the opposition by not playing a player where he was named to play ...”

One question recurs, of course. He says he struggles to answer it in a word, but settles for this: “The most skilful, thrilling, entertaining: Gary senior. The most consistent, effective, team-oriented: it could be Polly, but it could be Jimmy Bartel.”

Of this you can be certain: Col Hutchinson would know.