He shrugs and says it’s either/or – more often Dan, but perhaps Daniel if he’s in trouble with Mum.

Name is the easy bit. Place is harder to pin down.

Dan Howe thanks older brother Bart’s lack of footy ability for creating a grey area in the bragging rights to what becomes of his AFL career. In another football age, if he really kicked on, things could messy.

“State of origin – was that where you were born or your first club?” Howe wonders. “If that ever came back I don’t know where I’d sit.”

He was an Auskicker in Yarrawonga when Bart Howe, unable to get a game with the local juniors, headed across the Murray River into NSW to play with Rennie. Middle sibling Lachlan followed, and at nine Howe joined them as fast as his little legs could carry him.

While still at primary school he was playing under 17s for Rennie on Saturday (“off the bench, come on for a quarter and get a touch or two, that satisfied my needs”), and Sundays with the Yarrawonga under 14s.

He’s not sure how he was allowed to play for two clubs in different competitions, but he knows it helped his football development.

“I was always the small, skinny kid, but I think in a way that’s helped me in the long run – I’d have to find new ways to get the ball. I wasn’t the strongest, I wasn’t the quickest. I think one of my strengths now is reading the play, and I think that’s where it comes from.”

He treasures other things about his formative years and the place he lived them. His parents both have NSW farming backgrounds, met at university and found their way to Yarrawonga via Deniliquin.

Growing up on the banks of the Murray – and on the river itself – made for a dreamy childhood.

“Dad had me up on the skis at about five or six, those little ones with the bars in between,” he says of his introduction to an enduring love, water skiing. Howe plays down his prowess, says he goes all right, “nothing special – get up on one, go across the wake a few times, slalom”.

Devoting body and soul to being a Hawthorn footballer has rendered skiing a summer holidays only pursuit, and often not even then.

“The first year I got drafted I had knee tendinitis and couldn’t do it, last year I had hammy tightness. So I haven’t really had a chance since I was drafted.”

Knee and wake-boarding were other childhood staples, a bit of fishing until he got bored.

He admits he’s become a half-city, half-country person, and having followed Bart and Lach in school as well as sport – to Xavier College from Year 9 – it’s little wonder.

“Mum looks at photos now and doesn’t know how she let me go, but I was pretty keen to do it.”

Studying Year 12 (as the youngest Howe brother Sam is) he was playing school footy and TAC Cup with Murray Bushrangers in the holidays. But as big as footy had always been in his world, his ambition was tempered. “I just never really thought AFL was achievable.”

A game against a Carey Grammar side boasting a handful of soon-to-be high draftees including Jack Viney, Jackson Macrae, Kristian Jaksch and Nathan Hrovat was an awakening of sorts.

“I played on Macrae and did all right. Ever since then I’ve thought, ‘If they can do it, I can do it as well.’”

Measured belief is serving him well. Howe missed out on being drafted as an 18-year-old, but the interest clubs had shown emboldened him that with a full season of TAC Cup, some game time with Vic Country and a narrower focus he could demand a second chance.

It duly came with pick 31 in the 2014 draft.

No debut is forgotten, but his first game – against Gold Coast with Launceston’s elements at their most biting – is frozen in the memory.

He was sub for the first three quarters, replaced Cyril Rioli at the last change, and finished with 11 possessions.

“We were up by about 50 points and I think the boys gave me a few cheap ones to get my confidence up,” he says, downplaying the notion that he was on track for a 44-possession game.

Now his confidence is steadily building, along with his sense of what it takes to play consistently at the level.

He welcomes an apprenticeship in the back half and knows he’s blessed to have mentors of the calibre of Luke Hodge, Jordan Lewis and Sam Mitchell to chart a future path into the midfield.

“It’s obviously a great opportunity while they’re here – and hopefully that’s for a while – to learn their trade and how they go about it.”

He loves the connection that’s building with the next wave of Hawks, with whom he gathers in the rooms before games to check in on each other and harden rapport. “We’re trying to look after each other.”

Howe is stringing games together, ticking boxes, resetting goals. “I want to be part of the second half of the season and maybe even finals coming towards the pointy end.”