It’s a scene familiar to many.

Your day is done, the dishes are drying and it’s time to lie back on the lounge with a film or the latest episode of the television series you’ve been boring your friends senseless about.

You scan the various menus of the countless streaming services that mine monthly at your bank account before landing on a title and breaking out the popcorn.

You’re invested in the plot. You’re piecing it all together. You’re skeptical about some motives. Then suddenly your laser focus is blunted by the appearance of a familiar face.

Whether it’s M.C. Gainey on a pulpit, Kurt Fuller as an east coast attorney or Frankie Faison as a cranky Queens landlord, you and your compadres on the coach all sit forth and spit excitedly through chipped kernels – "It’s ‘that guy’!"

Both small and silver screens are littered with thespians that earn their crust as the grout between A-listers. They may be proof that the old idiom ‘there’s no small roles, only small actors’ is shrouded in sewerage, but their efforts to bob up, perform their typecast task before earning another recall on a set somewhere else in Tinsel town must be commended.

They are dedicated to their profession, and as so, deserve for us to at least learn their given name, rather than clicking our fingers as we run through our woefully sparse internal IMDB.

They are the rusted-on linchpins that allow for the show to go on, and even though they are often forgotten on awards night and are regularly stationed in much smaller trailers on Hollywood lots, they are the ones that turn in at night content that their elbow grease was the ointment that allowed for the stars to shine.

In a footballing sense, we refer to these performers as journeymen. They are the ones that skip from coast to coast - and post to post - with their swags on their back tasked with spinning as a small cog in a much larger machine.

Again, these names are often forgotten when September rolls around and the coaches, players and umpires begin doling their awards on household names, but this is no matter to these souls who hold dreams of team success and medallions adorning their neck by the close of the same month.

Each year as the regular season draws to a close, we see a fleet of these well-travelled athletes quietly hang their battered boots and clear their lockers before commencing routine lives. These entries into the mundaneness of the 9-to-5 often begin by filling their details on LinkedIn like the remainder of a plebeian population that could only ever dream of owning such preludes into the rat race.

For some, the memories of confetti, continuous renditions of club ditties and hops consumed from wreath covered cups will remain with them for a lifetime.

For others, their desk jobs begin with the knowledge that the long-haul flights and zinc clad pre-seasons never quite delivered the end goal.

Although their days in boots may have ceased after years of their badges never remaining hot property at their various club shops, their oft forgotten feats should never go without promotion.

Footballers often utter the drilled in phrase of holding an ability to play any team, anywhere and at any time in the name of victory, yet across the length and breath of a now national competition, no player can stress to have embodied this ethos more than the most journeyed of men, Jack Hombsch.

MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA - AUGUST 21: Jack Hombsch of Port Adelaide is chased by Paul Puopolo of the Hawks during the round 21 AFL match between the Hawthorn Hawks and Port Adelaide Power at Etihad Stadium on August 21, 2015 in Melbourne, Australia. (Photo by Robert Cianflone/Getty Images)

As a kid that no doubt fantasised about the league’s bright lights from his bedroom located in the dusty planes of rural South Australia, Hombsch was always destined to travel to achieve them.

In a scene reminiscent of Marlon Brando trading the ditches of Omaha for the red bricks of New York City, the defender’s journey to his first footballing home in the harbour city’s west would see him stare at the white lines of the highway for nigh on 20-hours after being selected as an underage prospect.

Still, it is unlikely that at any stage of that initial road trip that the now 28-year-old who called time on his career earlier this week would think that the game would request that he trek so far on so many occasions whilst running down his dream.

Though the vast majority of footballing fanatics would be hard pressed to remember a passage of play involving the Giant-come bolt brandisher-come Sun, the kid that cut his teeth on the playing fields of Roxby Downs leaves the game as the man who has plied his trade on more stages than any paid performer before him.

In spite of the fact that he hadn't added to his tally of 116 AFL appearances since late July of 2019, Hombsch ended his career on Monday as the only player to have ever busted through a banner at 21 league venues.

Should you run your eye across the catalogue of grounds that the backman graced, you are likely to find yourself rattling through them to the tune of Geoff Mack's late-fifties ear-worm 'I've been everywhere'.

Since making his debut whilst clad in orange to rounding out his days on the sunshine coast, Hombsch has been to: Carrara, Marrara, Canberra, Subiaco, Sydney, Hobart, Homebush, Ballarat, Blacktown, Townsville, Melbourne, Geelong, Brisbane, Docklands, West Lakes, Alice Springs, Launceston, Adelaide, Perth again, The Showgrounds and Shanghai twice.

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However, despite only the transient population of Cairns being the only folks deprived of his talents, the stopper was relegated to understudy when the lights were truly at their brightest.

For those that aspire to greatness on the stage, daydreams of opening night performances in any of the 41 theatres of Broadway likely act as the sum total of their fantasies as they toil through the tedium of their days.

For those that desire eternal deification for their deeds with a Sherrin, these reveries take place solely on football's form of the Manhattan performance district - the Melbourne Cricket Ground on the last Saturday in September.

Like any footballer, Hombsch was no different, as evidenced by his words with Scott Spits of The Age in 2018.

‘‘Obviously it’s every kid’s dream to be able to play on the MCG, and hopefully on grand final day," the then 25-year-old expounded.

"Any opportunity you get to play there is obviously pretty special.’’

Aside from eight-dress rehearsals at the Yarra Park precinct, Hombsch was never afforded the ability to act out his manful role by the time curtain had lifted and the patrons had packed the gunnels in mid-Spring.

MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA - SEPTEMBER 29: The MCG is seen as the sun rises before the 2018 Toyota AFL Grand Final match between the West Coast Eagles and the Collingwood Magpies at the Melbourne Cricket Ground on September 29, 2018 in Melbourne, Australia. (Photo by Michael Willson/AFL Media/Getty Images)

Perhaps this was due to the fact that the defender was playing for the league's youngest trifecta of teams. Perhaps it was because his sides of the time were in a constant state of fluctuation.

Irrespective of the fact that Hombsch never split the sticks at the storied ground, averaged a mean of just 13 disposals and never saw champagne corks fly down any of the races that pierce the playing fields perimeter, the reality that he sung his side's song on three-occasions whilst there will forever see him as the envy of many that filled out their census forms earlier this month.

BRISBANE, AUSTRALIA - APRIL 29: Jack Hombsch of the Power attempts to break away from the defence during the round six AFL match between the Brisbane Lions and the Port Adelaide Power at The Gabba on April 29, 2017 in Brisbane, Australia. (Photo by Bradley Kanaris/Getty Images)

Across a career that saw him become acquainted with a new oval every six-weeks on average, it is hard to pinpoint when the summit arrived for Hombsch.

Was it debuting on the Giants' opening night in 2012?

Was it earning third-place in the Power's best and fairest count in 2015?

Was it his first goal at the Adelaide Oval in the dying stages of a heavy Showdown loss a year later?

Was it being awarded the Jim Stynes Community Leadership Award in 2017 for his tireless efforts to improve the lives of those living with intellectual disabilities?

Was it entering the oval for his 100th game in 2019?

Was it chowing down on yum cha whilst sat high above the banks of the Huangpu River?

Or was it simply his ability to flip stones in every Australian state and territory in his attempts to obtain a ticket to the big dance?

For someone that never scaled the steps of the dais, this zenith is hard to locate, but then again, maybe it isn't for us to know.

Due to never once being seen by the league's whistleblowers as a candidate on Brownlow night, there were all sorts of awards designed to honour on-field actions that Hombsch was logically never in contention for across his decade in the game.

But for someone that, by rights, should be the owner of the nation's greatest fridge magnet collection and is almost certainly on a first name basis with every domestic airline steward imaginable, perhaps naming a departure lounge in his honour would be more befitting of a man who ventured to more corners of the country than one that played league football for over two-decades.

If not, at least the dependable defender should have plenty of free miles at his disposal for when international travel is once again a possibility.