Nick Daicos gave his first Brownlow signature to an eight-year-old with cancer
He had just polled 47 votes, more than anyone in the history of the award. The first thing he did with it was keep a promise he had made earlier that evening.
22 September 2026
Nick Daicos won the Brownlow Medal on Monday night with 47 votes, two more than anyone had ever polled, and he finished eleven clear of Bailey Smith on 36 and thirteen clear of Marcus Bontempelli on 34. He had thirteen three-vote games across the season, six of them in a row, which is also a record.
Then, on stage, he started talking about somebody else.
Logan
"I have a youngster, Logan, who is staying awake at the moment," Daicos said. "He has cancer. And I worked closely with him this year." The two met through the Make A Wish Foundation and have been sending videos back and forth ever since, most weeks, and Daicos said the reason any of it is possible is the job. "We're only able to do that and put a smile on his face because we're playing footy."
He did not leave it there. "I think he's probably taught me more than I taught him," he said, which is the kind of line people say about children in hospital without meaning it, except that he had already spent a year proving otherwise.
The promise
What nobody watching knew was that the two of them had settled something before the count even started. Hamish McLachlan, hosting, said it out loud on stage. "You and I chatted earlier," he told Daicos. "We said if you win, your first signature for the Brownlow will be for Logan."
So the first autograph Nick Daicos gave as a Brownlow medallist did not go to a sponsor, a collector or a queue. He signed the front page of Tuesday's Herald Sun, the one carrying a single word across it, "inevitable", and it went to an eight-year-old who had stayed up to watch.
Carry this story in five words
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How to play
One real news sentence. The job is to keep the five words that carry the story and let the rest go, then guess. Blue means the right word in the right place, orange means it is one of the five but sitting somewhere else, and grey means it is not one of them. Five tries. The result beats the process, the name or the job beats the place, and little words like a, the and of never count.
Yesterday: The kea's beak had split, leaving the alpine parrot unable to eat, and was rebuilt over 48 days with a gel hardened under an ultraviolet lamp. The five: kea's beak rebuilt with gel.