A few weeks ago, I took my young daughter to the Australian Sports Museum at the MCG. She had never been to the ground before and it felt modestly significant, for me if not for my daughter. Or perhaps for her too, but the significance for now is merely an egg that may or may not hatch in the future.

Two years ago, I spoke with the museum’s former curator. She told me that one of her jobs was to facilitate nostalgia. She succeeded.

We begin in the Olympics room, where various relics are held. My daughter is initially attracted to the medals, and then the helmets of past bobsleigh riders. Beside us is an elderly American couple, on the phone to their adult daughter back home. I know this because she’s on speaker. The father is explaining Aussie Rules to her and expressing his astonishment at the size of the teams.

At six weeks, I go with my partner for the first scan. In the waiting room, I prepare myself for crossing some threshold of acceptance that will surely follow glimpsing incipient life on a monitor. That’s what happens in the movies, right? The reclined woman, belly exposed to the scanning wand, holds her partner’s hand as both pairs of eyes are anxiously trained on the screen – both souls fused by their wondrous expectation.

“It’s the size of a chickpea,” the technician says, matter-of-factly.

No threshold is crossed. Instead, there’s a dreamy detachment. A sense of unreality. Perhaps there’s even an intellectual regression: it seems fanciful this cluster of cells – a chickpea with a microscopic heartbeat – will develop a brain, sentience, dress sense. I feel as if I’ve painlessly cleaved mind from body; that I am now floating above myself, watching as I play the roles of Calm, Expectant Father and Supportive Partner. I am simultaneously a tenor and his watchful conductor. Am I aberrant? What content is there to my performance, other than the sheer fulfilment of expectation? Other than simply being there?

In the Olympics room, I see Willy the Koala and experience involuntary time travel. Willy was the Australian Olympic mascot for the 1984 Los Angeles Games. I don’t remember the games but I remember my doona cover as a child. It was covered in Willy. The transportation is immediate and unexpected. I once hid under Willy; once soaked him with night sweats, the residue of nightmares. I’d not thought about Willy for a long time.

“Can we go to the next room?” my daughter asks.

“Absolutely,” I say.

My partner reclines again and exposes her belly to the wand. Remarkably, our chickpea is now recognisably human. Six centimetres long when curled, 12 centimetres “stretched out”. Two observable kidneys and a heart. Her head is 2.1 centimetres wide, and her spine is sharply discernible. We’re told her organs, except for her brain, are effectively complete and now subject only to growth. (At what point, precisely, is consciousness born?)

July 24, 2013. Liverpool versus Melbourne Victory. I’d bought tickets months before but was now certain I wouldn’t go. How could I? A friend had died a few days earlier, after a week in a coma. She’d felt unwell for weeks, and had dismissed the symptoms as an oddly persistent but harmless virus.

Then she collapsed. This vital, charming, unmistakably alive woman collapsed. A brain infection. As she lay comatose in the ICU for a week, we waited outside her room, leaving occasionally to smoke a cigarette. Her family wept, prayed and counted rosary beads. Their vigil was profound. Eventually, the news came: it was irrevocable. The machines would be turned off. Before they were, we were each, individually, allowed to enter her room and say goodbye.

I had no interest in going to the MCG that night. But I’d bought the ticket with a mate who was then living interstate and had flown here for the game and was now sleeping on my couch. He had no one else to go with and I surrendered to accommodating him.

I’m glad I did. I remember nothing of the match itself, but what happened before it began remains embalmed in my memory: the majority of the 95,000-strong crowd singing the Liverpool anthem “You’ll Never Walk Alone”. For a few minutes I wept, astonished by the largeness of the sound, the passionate commitment that sustained this vast but temporary union.

My daughter is less than an hour old and now lies upon a blanket on a scale under heat lamps. Having fearfully cut the umbilical cord, the nurses now give me another job. It’s to clean the meconium from her – the newborn’s debutant shit. “Unlike later faeces, meconium is composed of materials ingested during the time the infant spends in the uterus: intestinal epithelial cells, lanugo, mucus, amniotic fluid, bile and water.”

For a tiny thing, she’s expelled an astonishing volume of it. It has the look – and, more importantly, the consistency – of tar. The clean-up requires a small hill of baby wipes, each application requiring a force I’m uncomfortable applying to a child only a few minutes old and not much larger than my shoe. Imagine trying to clean an oil spill from a boiled quail egg.

Eventually I finish cleaning. This may have taken minutes or days. Then the nurse says that two injections are needed. “For me?”

“For her.”

“Of course.”

She says I can avert my eyes. She tells me most parents do. I don’t. Maybe it’s because she’s told me that most parents avert their eyes, and I’m contrarian, but probably it’s because the thought of taking my eyes off her is impossible – even when a needle is penetrating her beautiful, soft, little frog-legs.

On this night, exactly 13 years before, Luciano Pavarotti gave his last public performance, to open the Turin Winter Olympics. It was sub-zero that evening and, enfeebled by several distressed vertebrae, Pavarotti rose from a wheelchair to sing “Nessun dorma”. There followed a long and ardent ovation. After his death, the following year, Pavarotti’s conductor revealed the performance had been successfully mimed. “The orchestra pretended to play for the audience, I pretended to conduct and Luciano pretended to sing,” he wrote in his memoir. “The effect was wonderful.”

At the museum, my once-chickpea sees the soft, giant footballs. “Can I jump on them?” she asks.

Of course.

She runs and leaps, then slides back down. She wants to reach the top of them, to sit triumphantly at their summit, and retreats to reconsider her approach. She runs again, leaps and scrambles to the top.

Nine months before the Liverpool game, I’d come here with my now-dead friend to watch the elimination final between our Fremantle Dockers and Geelong. Matthew Pavlich kicked six that night, and Freo won their first ever finals match away from home. Afterwards, we went straight to the pub where my friend’s partner worked and celebrated with shots of cheap whisky.

In the museum there’s a set of real stumps, then the physical space of a cricket pitch, and at the end is a wall upon which is projected alternating images of the opposing stumps in different environments. My daughter asks me what stumps are and I’m aware of the inadequacy of my explanation as I take a photo of her crouched behind them in the stance of a wicketkeeper. Afterwards, I take another photo of her beneath an oil painting of Allan Border.

It’s 1989 and I’m playing at the WACA. It’s lunch during the Sheffield Shield match between Western Australia and Queensland, and several Kanga Cricket matches now assume the turf. Our bats, ball and stumps are all made of yellow plastic. We’re anxious, perhaps delirious with excitement, and play with a sense of heightened purpose: We’re on the WACA.

I take a screamer of a catch. Afterwards, when we all shake hands with the captain of Western Australia, Graeme Wood, he surprises me by saying that he saw my catch and was impressed. I grin.

After lunch, we retire to the stands to watch the afternoon session. WA’s in, and it must be the end of their innings because Bruce Reid’s batting. Reid was a gifted fast bowler and, at 203 centimetres, Australia’s tallest ever Test paceman. He was the first Australian to take a hat-trick in one-day internationals, went on to destroy the Poms in the 1990-91 Ashes, and his name might’ve been carved in granite somewhere were it not for the vulnerability of his back.

He was also a terrible batter. Comically bad. But on that glorious day, against Allan Border’s Queensland, I watch our blond giraffe with the cursed spine hit two sixes off the same over. Or so I remember.

There’s a room in the museum that my daughter especially loves. It contains famous jockey silks and other relics of horseracing. That’s not what interests her. My daughter’s focus is on The Game. In this room, you colour cartoon horses with crayons, then scan your picture, give it a name and watch as it’s magically entered into a race on a giant screen. Our first horse is called Strawberry Silver and she finishes second. We can not leave until we race again.

I want to tell my daughter, and suppose I will someday, of the only time I made money betting on the horses. It was 2001 and I was unemployed and struggling to make rent that week. I sold a collection of my CDs to a store that traded in them, and then put the $50 on Ethereal to win the Melbourne Cup. I’d chosen that horse only because the then Democrats senator Natasha Stott Despoja had favoured it, as revealed in some celebrity vox pop I’d read in a newspaper days earlier. If memory serves, her nomination was whimsical: she just liked the name.

Well, so did I. The horse won, I paid rent, and 12 years later I told this story to my boss in a taxi on the way to the National Press Club where he was speaking with the same former senator. Once there, and with no warning, he told her I had a story to share. Reluctantly, I did.

Outside the stadium, my daughter admires the giant statues and poses with her tube of glitter before Shane Warne. She doesn’t know who he is. Doesn’t know that her father attended his memorial at this very ground, nor understand the concept of memorialisation. Which is exactly as it should be for now. As we walk back towards the train station, along the Avenue of Legends, she asks only that I pick her up for an airplane ride.

Of course, my angel. Of course.