Dustin Martin’s 300^th game last Saturday was a huge milestone. Now it’s time to herald another, one which won’t be greeted with any acclaim but is still good for a laugh at least.

Round 15 this season marks the 25^th anniversary of one of the game’s arguably strangest moments, a “mark” taken not by one of the players from the two competing teams, but, bizarrely, one of the umpires.

The year was 1999, the venue Subiaco in Perth, the teams Fremantle and St Kilda, the Dockers struggling at the time but the Saints inside the eight and looking to cement their spot.

Scores were low and play tight in the first term when Docker midfielder Adrian Fletcher gathered the ball next to the boundary line on the wing and turned inboard, spotting teammate Brad Wira free in the centre.

A beautiful pass was headed straight for its target when came an intercept from the unlikeliest of sources, none other than field umpire Peter Carey, who not only failed to get out of the way, but jumped slightly to take a very comfortable “mark”.

The stunned Wira threw out his arms in disbelief, while St Kilda opponent Gavin Mitchell actually began to tackle Carey as though he was an opponent before the unthinkable registered.

“Carey by name, [Wayne] Carey by nature,” commentator Dennis Cometti quipped, as callers and crowd alike wondered whether they really had actually seen what they thought they just had, and a now-smiling Mitchell returned the ball to the ump for an apologetic bounce and re-start.

While the game itself resulted in a forgettable 23-point win to the Dockers, the incident will be remembered forever.

Carey at least took the “blooper” with good grace, even after being dumped from the senior panel for a week as penance.

“It was my five minutes of fame, I suppose,” he recalled years later to AFL Media, self-deprecatingly, and perhaps a little unfairly given he umpired 307 games of VFL and AFL including four Grand Finals, one of which was the unforgettable 1989 stoush between Hawthorn and Geelong.

“It was my 299th game, and I remember saying to the guys in the rooms before the game: ‘I’ve got my 300th next week, so I don’t want any stuff-ups’. Yet I go out and do that!

“It looked as if I’d deliberately jumped up to catch the ball, but it wasn’t the case. Anyway, it hit, it stuck, and I thought: ‘What do I do now?’ All I could do was bounce the footy, because it had never happened before and is probably never likely to happen again.”

Or so we all thought. Because though it didn’t receive nearly as much publicity, Carey was joined in the “umpy takes a mark” pantheon in 2015, when, at the MCG, umpire Brendan Hosking, at close range, also grabbed a ball which Port Adelaide’s Hamish Hartlett had mistakenly kicked right at him.

Hosking was waving play-on after Hartlett had taken a free kick for out-on-the-full on the Southern Stand wing. The immediate reaction from the commentary box underlined just how much a part of football folklore the first incident had become.

“He’s done a Peter Carey!” Hawthorn and AFL great Jason Dunstall said as fellow commentators laughed. As a result, umpire Hosking called a ball up, which led to Blues midfielder Tom Bell kicking a game-changing goal for Carlton, which went on to win the game by just four points.

The other notable legacy from the “Carey mark” was in setting a precedent for a series of strange things occurring in subsequent Fremantle-St Kilda games.

It would be a clash between the Dockers and Saints which led to the “Whispers in the Sky” controversy in 2005, when journalist Tony Jones reported the day after a thriller in Perth that Fremantle had won after the siren, that umpire Matthew Head had said to him while boarding the post-game flight back to Melbourne: “now I know what a victory feels like”.

The alleged comments — which Head has always vigorously denied — came in the week after St Kilda coach Grant Thomas had made disparaging comments about umpires in the lead-up to the game and said umpires should “leave their ego in the locker when they start their career”.

The following year, 2006, produced an even bigger controversy in Launceston with “Sirengate”, when umpires failed to hear the final siren, St Kilda in that time scoring a point to tie the scores. The AFL Commission subsequently overturned the result and awarded victory to Fremantle.

That’s some trifecta of weirdness. But while “Sirengate” was the most dramatic of these incidents, and “Whispers in the Sky” the most intriguing, it’s no contest for the most spectacular, Peter Carey’s “mark” the footy vision that, 25 years on, keeps on giving.

You can read more of Rohan Connolly’s work at FOOTYOLOGY.