If round one matches are all about hope entwined with expectation, the circumstances and characters involved in Collingwood's opening match of the 1945 season deserves to rank a special mention.

It's a game largely forgotten now. Almost 70 years on, it's a moment that precious few Magpie fans have cause to recall, and even fewer of them can boast to have been among the 13,000 supporters who clicked through the Victoria Park gates for the match against North Melbourne.

That's a shame. For it is a day that should never been expunged from Collingwood folklore, not so much for what happened on the field on that April afternoon, or for the Magpies' 21-point win, but for those who played for the club in that match.

Three stars of the future - one of them still 15 and another 17 - debuted for Collingwood on the day and there was also the welcome return of a few older players who fans had feared they might not see in black and white colours again.

There was also the pointed non-appearance of a former champion who had briefly toyed with repairing his fractured relationship with Collingwood before deciding once and for all that the wedge between the two was a chasm that could not be reconnected.

It was a time of ensuing optimism in Collingwood, across Australia and in many pockets of a war-weary world. The long and bloody Second World War - one that had literally come to Australia's doorstep - had finally taken an almighty turn for the better in two theatres of war.

As legendary coach Jock McHale prepared his charges for the first match of what loomed as an important season, the Soviet Red Army was circling the outskirts of Berlin and Adolf Hitler had little more than a week to live. And on the other side of the world, the battle of Okinawa was proving one of the most intense, deadly battles of the war, though it would also signal the final throes of Japan's resistance.

And as the war edged towards a conclusion, Collingwood and McHale felt as if 1945 would be the season in which the club could finally attain some illumination after five seasons of gloom. The wily old coach knew the tide was about to turn.

In pure football terms, there was renewed hope for Collingwood ahead of the first game of 1945. Since making the 1939 Grand Final and losing to Melbourne – in the very first month of war - the Magpies had endured the darkest period in the club's history.

Collingwood missed the finals in five successive seasons - 1940-1944 - and had come perilously close to "winning" the dreaded wooden spoon in 1942. At one stage the club had even contemplated temporarily merging with Melbourne because it could barely field a team.

The bleak years had seen many of the Magpie players volunteer for the war effort, rendering the football factories (the schools and local clubs in the suburb) that had fed Collingwood for so long almost as barren as the off-field performances.

As the Argus recorded leading into that first game, "No team has been harder hit in the last two or three years by absence of playing on service as Collingwood. There now seems to be a slight turn of the tide."

There was a feeling that a mix of the old and the new might once more restore Collingwood to its rightful place near "the top of the tree".

When the names of the Magpies' first team for 1945 went up in some of the shop windows in Johnston Street, there was a real hope that the game against North Melbourne – a team that had beaten Collingwood only three times, but twice in the previous five years – would mark a new beginning.

McHale named four new players for the round one game. Two were 20-year-olds straight out of the club's reserves side. One was, incredibly, sixteen days short of his 16th birthday. The other, with a famous Collingwood name, was still five months shy his 18th birthday.

Alan Brown, 20, kicked two of Collingwood's 13 goals that afternoon. It was a fine return for his first match. He would manage to play only another 15 games in his career that spanned the 1945-46 seasons.

The three other debutants would become legitimate stars of the game, though sadly one would shine the brightest far away from Collingwood.

Twenty-year-old Neil Mann, who died earlier this year, also kicked a goal in his first game that day. As a player, a captain, a coach and a reserves coach, Mann would give his life to Collingwood in many different guises over many decades. But on that day in 1945 - the first of his 179 games – he made his mark as a forward. Later he would shift to the backline before finally becoming a top ruckman in the 1950s.

Bill Twomey Jr. carried a name that McHale was familiar with, even though he had not recognised the kid with exceptional talent when he first fronted to Collingwood training. He was the eldest son of Bill Twomey Sr., who enjoyed a fleeting but successful career for Collingwood in 54 games from 1918-1922 (playing in one flag from four Grand Finals) before a 10-game stint with Hawthorn in 1933-34.

Bill Twomey Jr. would never forget his first night of training under McHale. He would recall many years later: "I don't know whether I had met Jock McHale or not, but he called me to the centre (of the ground) and he said: 'What's your name?' I said: 'Bill Twomey'. He said to me: 'Oh, you're Bill's son…How do you reckon you will like playing in the first match.'" The die was cast. He would be playing in the first game.

It would be the start of a sometimes tense relationship between the flamboyant, flashy Twomey and the no-frills, no-nonsense coach. Though on that day in April 1945, McHale - who rarely sung the individual praises of his players - knew he had something special in Twomey, who was one of the best players in a superb first-up performance in black and white.

The last of the four debutants that afternoon was Len Fitzgerald. He was yet to turn 16. To that stage, the last Collingwood player to debut as young as Fitzgerald was the great Albert Collier, that champion of the Machine team during the 1920s and '30s. Fitzgerald had been a graduate of the club's junior curtain-raiser system, which had an uncanny knack of producing young football prodigies.

Collingwood’s long-time secretary Frank Wraith, who had helped to start up the junior curtain-raiser games, told anyone who had listened to him in the lead-up to that North Melbourne game in 1945 that Collingwood had found "another Albert Collier". Like Collier, who went to Tasmania for two seasons, Fitzgerald would later head interstate (to South Australia) in his prime, but not before playing an extraordinarily brief but exceptionally good 96 games with the Magpies.

Sadly, unlike Collier, he would never return to the club.

Magpie fans were shattered when the football comet that was Len Fitzgerald left Collingwood for greater opportunities in terms of money and employment in Adelaide in 1950, as the Magpies steadfastly stuck to their egalitarian each-player-must-earn-the-same philosophy. He would eventually win three Magarey Medals for Sturt. But those who were there on that day in 1945, and those that saw him shine so brightly and so briefly in black and white, will never forget it.

Prior to the first game, the Argus stated: "Two players from the seconds - mere boys as far as age is concerned - seem sure to be seniors this year. They are Fitzgerald, a centre half-back, who is six foot and 13 stone; and Bill Twomey, son of a former player, who may fill the centre position."

If those fresh new faces provided hope for the future in early 1945, then the return of two familiar faces also warmed the hearts of Collingwood supporters.

Alby Pannam, a star of the 1930s and early 40s, and also an uncle to the emerging young rover Lou Richards, had missed the entire 1944 season while serving in the RAAF. He was released to play for Collingwood in 1945, having celebrated his 31st birthday two days before the clash with North Melbourne, and he slotted home two goals on the day. Pannam was elected captain for the season, serving for only one year, as his father, Charlie Sr. had done in 1905.

But the most interesting return to Collingwood that day in 1945 was that of Des Fothergill, who had left the club without a transfer for VFA club Williamstown at the end of 1940 - the year he shared the Brownlow Medal with South Melbourne's Herb Matthews. He had left amidst much acrimony as he had been only 20 years old at the time and had won three of the previous four Copeland Trophies.

When the VFL decided in March 1945 to lift the ban on players who had transferred to the VFA without a permit, it allowed the likes of Fothergill to return to their original clubs - if those clubs would have them back.

But, as the Argus predicted before the Round 1 clash, Fothergill's return was met with a "warm welcome" from the faithful - even from McHale, who knew just how good a player he had been, and still could be.

Fothergill was not yet 25, but he had suffered a knee injury playing in a services match in Darwin, and had to modify his game to suit this. It dulled some of the brilliance he had shown since an early age, although he proved in his first game back - his first for Collingwood since round 18, 1940 - that he would be an important player for the club.

The Argus preview to Collingwood's opening match rather cruelly pointed out: "He (Fothergill) is too solid for roving now and will be a wing/half forward." Yes, 'Fother' was chunkier, but the one thing he had not lost was his uncanny knack of kicking goals. He would boot five goals in his return match against North Melbourne and would end the season on 62 goals - only five behind the VFL leading goal-kicker, Melbourne's Fred Fanning.

But as joyful as it was for Collingwood fans at the start of that 1945 season - to see the old and the new again - it could have been so much better if the club and champion forward Ron Todd had resolved their differences.

For a time, it looked like they would. But petty differences and the personality difficulties of the men involved meant he was not allowed back into the fold as Fothergill had been.

Todd, a prodigious goal-kicker for Collingwood in the mid to late 1930s, had controversially transferred to Williamstown in the VFA in 1940. With the rule change allowing VFA players to return to the VFL, fans were hopeful of seeing him return to the black and white.

According to Richard Stremski's Kill For Collingwood, long-time Collingwood benefactor John Wren told Frank Wraith: "You've got an open cheque" to secure Todd.

But there was some opposition at committee level in regard to Todd's return. There remains conjecture about whether Todd was outside the committee room when the debate was raging and left because he knew there was opposition, or whether he chose of his own accord to leave Victoria Park forever, to return to Williamstown where he proceeded to kick an Australian record of 188 goals that year.

McHale would never forgive Todd.

Two of those star first-year players in 1945 lamented the fact they never got to play with Todd. Mann said decades later: "We should have matched that offer (from Williamstown)."

Twomey was even more emphatic, saying: "The thing that disappointed me about (when he got picked to play with Collingwood) was that I thought Ron Todd was coming back. It was a tragedy that he didn't come back because we would have probably won a couple of premierships. Although having the top full-forward doesn’t guarantee you the premiership, we might have won that one in '45."

Collingwood didn't win that 1945 flag, though for a time - even without Todd - the Magpies looked as if they might. Having defeated North Melbourne on the opening day of the season, they would win seven of the first 10 games and easily qualify for the club’s first finals series since 1939, which delighted Magpies fans.

But Collingwood’s season would end in the 1945 preliminary final against Carlton in a bruising encounter that was every bit as rough as the 'Bloodbath' Grand Final a week later. Having led by 28 points with only a quarter to play, the Magpies were overrun by the Blues on that day.

The Magpies would have to wait another eight years to break their premiership drought - which occurred 60 years ago this season.

And it was fitting that two of the men who debuted on that memorable day against North Melbourne in round one, 1945 - Neil Mann and Bill Twomey - played key roles for the club in helping to win the 1953 premiership.