How would this go over if she weren’t a nana? Not very well, I suspect, and maybe not very well anyway. Garner’s an avowed feminist, but her investigations into the ways that people—which is to say, usually, but not exclusively, men—use sex and gender to arrange power relations have, at times, been sympathetic to men, and have not always absolved women of the roles they play. (Her book about a 1991 sexual-assault scandal at a university, “The First Stone,” is subtitled “Some Questions About Sex and Power.”) Even here, women don’t always come out very well, if they’re there at all. She tells Amby the story of Achilles, whose “cold, angry mother” refused to let the name of the exiled Patroclus be written on Achilles’ tombstone. There’s a “woman in black” who mysteriously ignites a brawl. “Girls,” Amby says at one point, “the bane of my existence.” At one point, he tells his nana that he called someone on the field “a cunt” in a match. “Was he offended?” Garner asks. “I don’t think so,” Amby replies. Was she offended? She never says.

Every once in a while, she stops short. The blithe stories of head injuries, reports of sexual abuse in the football clubs. But then the action carries her forward. How could it not? It is elemental, dangerous, animalistic, exhilarating. Before a big game, she catches sight of the men, their “mullets and cropped heads and tousled crowns of hair, enormous faces and eyes and teeth, and thundering voices.” They “throw their arms round each other in a ring to roar their chorus, and rush out past me like a dam breaking,” as she squeezes herself against a wall. And then heroes take the field and the game begins.

It is not clear what Garner learns during the season. She begins with a certain belief about what footy means to men, and to herself, and in the end finds her view justified. Fandom, anyway, is a leap of faith. You can note the preposterous hypocrisies, the blind spots of men and their ambitions, the awfulness of the violence. You can ask why, but the answers are uncompelling. For Garner, footy is a bridge between the naturally martial instincts of men and the peace upon which rational civilization depends. During the pandemic, when she is at home, watching her beloved Western Bulldogs play Australian Football League games in empty stadiums, it gives her life a kind of shape and meaning: “I saw that it’s a kind of poetry, an ancient common language between strangers, a set of shared hopes and rules and images, of arcane rites played out at regular intervals before the citizenry.” But a bridge can be crossed in both directions, not only into peace but out of it. There are plenty of moments in this book, as in sport, where it seems more accurate to say that the “drive to violence” that pushes men into one another on the field is not sublimated but excused, even encouraged; that what is delicate and tender in Amby is being hammered out.

Near the end of the book, immediately after a great victory by the Colts, Amby’s father grapples with the news that his favorite A.F.L. team, the Bulldogs, have suffered a bad defeat. It takes him out of his joy for his son. Garner watches his anguish, with respect. “How deep it goes in men, this bond, this loyalty,” Garner notes. “I would never mock it.” Not mock it, perhaps, but wonder at it, just as I found myself wondering why she believes footy must fundamentally be a man’s world, when her own granddaughter was the “erstwhile tackle machine of her university team,” and just as I found myself wondering why she felt the need to efface herself. It’s not true, anyway. At the end there is a double triumph: for the Colts, and for her. Amby’s teammate Angus, who is strong but distractable, who is always a little apart, who once had to run as punishment for taking cupcakes onto the field, takes Garner’s hand and speaks to her. “You were there, weren’t you,” he says, “right from the start.” ♦