News of Gary Ablett’s season-ending surgery spread across the football world on Wednesday, and the hearts of footy supporters everywhere became a little heavier.

Even the most bitter of Geelong fans, upset at the champ’s defection, or the most strident of Brisbane Lions supporters (those Q-Clashes can be intense!) must have been a little saddened by the fact we’d seen the last of Gaz for 2014.

Gaz is poetry in motion – watching him run amok throughout this past two seasons has been a treat, a joy to behold.

We dare say that if you were to ask AFL fans their favourite player who doesn’t play for their club, G Ablett would be the most popular response by the length of the straight.

He’s long surpassed Chris Judd in terms of consistent class over a long period of time, and Lance Franklin is, well, Lance Franklin.

Joel Selwood might garner a few nominations, but his tendency to drop low to get high-contact free-kicks earns him just as many knockers, while Nat Fyfe and his balletic marking are still a couple of years away from full bloom.

But Gaz captures hearts like Brownlow votes – hell, he even does a better job of selling religion than the Pope.

In a couple of AFL seasons blighted by Essendon’s supplements scandal, rising ticket prices and disgruntled punters, little Gaz’s bald noggin is a beacon of light on a pretty bleak footy landscape.

It had been so much fun watching him charge toward the Brownlow, and now the next time we’ll see him will be on the Monday before the grand final, praying he can hold on in the count.

The only bloke sadder than me, I reckon, would be his coach Bluey McKenna, but in the long run this injury will actually do him good in his inexorable march to the Suns’ first flag.

Seeing Bennell, Swallow, Prestia and O’Meara et al have to negotiate the depths of winter – and perhaps a final or two – without him can only benefit them long-term.

And, for the rest of us, we’ll just have to make to do without the greatest player of the modern era until 2015.