When Steph Catley was growing up, playing football in Melbourne, she had no idea who the Matildas were.
SPOILER ALERT: Key moments from this documentary are discussed in this feature.
So minimal was the mainstream media coverage — and so small a place did the women's game occupy in global football — that it wasn't until she joined the youth national sides that she began to learn about the team she has now represented for the better part of the past decade.
The Matildas vice-captain remembers glimpsing inside one of her first jerseys and reading the team's now-famous quote, "Never say die", stitched just above the crest, right next to her heart.
It was only once she was there, in the team's inner sanctum, feeling the weight of history in that jersey, that she truly understood who the Matildas were and what they meant.
Now, the rest of us are about to glimpse that world, too.
Next week will see the launch of a new, six-part documentary titled Matildas: The World At Our Feet.
It's a fly-on-the-wall style series and the most intimate look yet into the journey of a team that has nestled itself into the hearts of sports fans across the country.
With the 2023 Women's World Cup on home soil less than 100 days away, attention on the Matildas is reaching fever-pitch.
And, while their names will dominate headlines and their games will sell out Australia's biggest stadiums throughout July and August, it will be easy to forget just how difficult the road has been to get here.
This documentary series, then, acts as a kind of scrapbook; a visual collection of moments and memories that capture the almost-unbearable struggles and sacrifices the players and staff have made over the past two-and-a-half years under head coach Tony Gustavsson as they prepared themselves for the biggest tournament of their lives.
"As Matildas, we're so proud of our team and, sometimes, it's really hard to put into words why we love it so much and what it is that makes it so special, but this series gives you a glimpse into that," Catley told ABC Sport.
"I think it also gives people a glimpse into the life of an elite female athlete in the football world, doing what we do. The travel, the pressures, the struggles that people don't see day-to-day.
"There's obviously a lot of judgement on us as individual players and, sometimes, people forget that we're humans and that we've got a lot going on behind the scenes. But this shows you a lot of that."
Indeed, despite the Matildas' meteoric rise over the past decade — from semi-professional athletes juggling second jobs outside their football to representing the world's biggest brands and playing for the game's biggest clubs — yet they still have a sense of down-to-earth reality to them.
It's what makes the players so relatable and, in turn, what makes this team so adored: They are, at the end of the day, just like us.
They make scrambled eggs and tease each other and go on picnics and fall in love and sing (badly) the Titanic theme song in the dressing-room.
They just happen to kick a ball way better than anyone else.
And that, really, is what this documentary series is about.
Of course, there is a focus on what happens on the field; The ebbs and flows of the team's results after the arrival of Gustavsson in early 2021 as they navigated the most difficult schedule of games that they have ever faced.
There is the drama of the Asian Cup quarter-final exit to South Korea, the against-the-clock rehabilitation of Ellie Carpenter from an ACL injury, the cycling-through of new faces in an attempt to build squad depth, the touch-and-go status of several key players as they push their bodies and minds to breaking-point — literally, in the case of Alanna Kennedy's nose — as the team experiences loss after loss after loss.
However, all of that is given new context here, new dimensions, new explanations and new vindications.
"It was a really tough period," Catley said.
"It's great that we had the cameras during that period, because there was so much scrutiny on us at that point. It felt like the world was against us and, while we knew what was going on in camp, nobody else did.
"We were blooding new players. We were resting old ones. It was all in mind for the World Cup and, sometimes, it seems like chaos from an outsider's perspective, but everything was carefully thought through.
"We did cop it a bit in terms of losing matches. We lost a lot, more than probably what Disney had anticipated when they came in.
"But I think it shows a really cool part of the story, because we're on the other side of that now. We've got all these new young players that are internationally experienced and capable of stepping into these roles.
"We battled through that, but now we're a lot more prepared for the World Cup than we would have been if we'd not tried anything and not gone through it."
Cameras are in the room, for example, when the executive team of Football Australia (FA) are deciding whether to field Australia's strongest line-up against Spain in a friendly window last year, despite the fact several core players were on the edge of burn-out and potential long-term injury.
"If you play Sam [Kerr] in June this year, it could cost you Sam in June of next year," says FA's head of high performance, Paddy Steinfort, presciently.
Several veteran players miss that window, making way for emerging talents such as Cortnee Vine, Charlotte Grant and Courtney Nevin.
The Matildas lose 7-0 to Spain, but as Gustavsson says in the circle after full-time: "We came here for a reason. We came here to learn something. We may have lost the game, but we win an experience. If we win one player for the World Cup roster in '23, it's worth it. I promise you it was worth it."
In the end, the editorial decision to splice together the Matildas' on-field battles with their off-field ones is no accident. It is, instead, a reflection of the fact that athletes are people first, and that their ability to perform is deeply tied to their lives behind the scenes.
The best example of this is Katrina Gorry, whose return to the team following the birth of her first child, Harper, forms one of the series' central narratives.
Having somewhat faded from view prior to Gustavsson's arrival through a combination of injury, form and a loss of love for the game, Gorry's resurgence to becoming a crucial cog in the team's midfield is tied directly to her having found purpose and perspective as a new mum.
It is one of sport's eternal cliches that teams become families but, in the case of the Matildas — whose core players such as Kerr, Caitlin Foord, Catley, Emily Van Egmond, Alanna Kennedy, Lydia Williams and Kyah Simon have literally grown up together in the national team over the past decade — family is the only word that comes close to the bond they have formed.
One particularly moving scene is when veteran winger Emily Gielnik arrives in camp a day early as she's planning to propose to her long-term partner.
She confides in Ellie Carpenter via FaceTime about her overwhelming nerves, narrating the tensions she's experienced with her Croatian heritage and the expectations of her family and her culture.
However, she says, it's the Matildas who have been with her through it all, giving her the support to embrace her identity and the courage to live fully and freely for the first time. They have, in many ways, saved her life (spoiler: her partner says yes).
"For myself, personally, the Matildas has always been a safe space for me," Catley said.
"There's been moments in my life that have been the hardest that I've ever been through while I've been away with these girls, and they've been my lifeline, my support — my everything, really.
"Those kinds of relationships and that sort of feeling … it's not like a regular job. It's not a regular situation. We are actually a family, and moments like that — where it's the biggest moment in someone's life — we're all there to support, we're all there to celebrate, to be there through the highs and lows."
Shining through the entire series is also a deep sense of responsibility: to each other, to the shirt, to the memory of the players who have come before them, and to the next generation who will come after them.
A bristling Kerr calls out a sexist headline in a News Corp article, days after she'd broken Tim Cahill's all-time goal-scoring record: "I cannot believe, in this day and age, someone could write this and have young girls read it," she says, "and that the Telegraph would publish such a sexist comment on the front page."
Kerr carries a lot in this series. She is, unsurprisingly, one of its two primary protagonists — alongside Carpenter — although you never get the sense that she sees herself in that way.
For the captain, everything she does is for the team. She beat herself up for months after their Asian Cup failure and exhausted herself trying to get to every fan meet-and-greet and book signing that she could.
It is as though she saw herself from the outside, knowing how important the global spotlight was, and what she needed to do while she was in it. Yet she remained her laid-back, honest, passionate self throughout it all (swear-words and all).
The cameras are bedded in the team enough at this point to provide glimpses into sacred spaces, such as dressing-rooms and private homes, particularly in moments where emotions are heavy and difficult to untangle.
Even Gustavsson is caught up in it. His speeches after losses or wins are textured with fury or pride.
You see why the players have maintained their belief in him, even while it threatened to flicker out for the rest of us over the past two years.
In hindsight, given the Matildas' most recent run of performances — which the series does not capture, ending with their 4-0 win over Sweden last year — Gustavsson emerges from the wreckage a humble hero: The man who stuck to his vision, even — and especially — when nobody outside the inner sanctum could see it.
"For all of us, we understood how important it was to get our story out there and the impact it could have on a new generation," said Mary Fowler, whose rise from Cairns wonder-kid to Manchester City midfielder is another main narrative thread of the series.
"It's just getting people to understand football more as a whole. To understand what we're doing on the field and how we've gotten there, you need to understand who we are off the field and the things that we've faced there.
"It's not just a straight line to get to the national team … Looking back at the start of the documentary, till now, you can see the ups and downs that we've had. But the group has stayed together, and we've always had this core belief in ourselves.
"The series shows it really well: how we've had those rough patches but, over time, we ended up getting better because of it.
"I think it just goes to show how much we're willing to trust the process, trust each other, and believe in what this team can do.
"So, we've had our ups and downs, but I think everything happened at the right time. We've built from those things, we learned from them and, in the most recent game, we beat bloody England. So we're headed in the right direction."
These players understand, deep in their bones, what this Women's World Cup on home soil means — not for them, but for all of us.
Every player is driven to succeed by something deeper than personal accolades or team trophies.
They know the power of a moment to alter the course of a life, of a community, of a country.
The final episode opens with Lydia Williams, the first Australian goalkeeper to pass 100 caps and a proud First Nations woman.
She is reaching the twilight of her career and, sensing the next door of her life starting to open, returns to the wide, quiet desert of Western Australia to re-visit her childhood and reconnect with her country.
Williams meets with her late father's old friend, Uncle Gregg, who lives on a cattle station north of Kalgoorlie.
They crush bush berries between rocks and look through old photos of her father and stand beside a campfire beneath a sky dripping with stars.
Williams talks about wanting to be like Cathy Freeman, the first Aboriginal woman athlete she remembers seeing on television: The athlete who inspired her, who inspired a nation, and who inspired almost every Matilda she knows.
She wants to do that, she says. She wants to change the world, one step at a time.
"You might not realise it," Uncle Gregg says softly to her, "but it's already happening."
Matildas: The World At Our Feet launches on Disney+ on April 26.
