The road to Australian football's past is easily missed if you don't know where to look.

About 90 minutes south of Sydney, just past Bombo Beach near the coastal town of Kiama, a single green sign points off the Princes Highway and up into the hills towards Jamberoo.

Wide green fields spill over the horizon the higher you climb; the noise of the world below slowly drifting across the sea, replaced by the quiet hush of forests and herds of gently mooing cows.

Most people know Jamberoo for its nearby water park, but Australian football people know it for something else.

The sport's collective memories are stored towards the end of Allowrie Street, across the road from a bus stop and a grocery store.

The place — known simply as Jamberoo Pub — has an anonymity that makes its own kind of sense.

This is how the Australian game has always felt: something out of the way, hidden from public view, its secrets and stories known only to those who are already part of their telling.

Even before you step inside, you can feel history beckoning: a Matildas flag taped to a window, a sun-faded yellow shirt listing the names of football's pioneers nailed to a corkboard.

The pub is owned by the Warren family, whose late patriarch Johnny was known as "Captain Socceroo": one of the leading voices in the Australian game from his time as a player in the 1960s and 70s to his time as a coach, pundit, and broadcaster with SBS until his death in 2004.

Warren was a true disciple of the world game: a genuine believer in its power to create change, and fiercely committed to the idea that Australia could, one day, become a football nation.

"We've got to stop talking about when we're going to qualify [for World Cups]," he once famously said after being awarded an Order of Merit from FIFA.

"We've got to start talking about when we're going to win World Cups.

"Champion teams beat teams of champions, and there's a big lesson there for Australian soccer.

The front room of the pub, which is now run by Johnny's nephew Jamie, is like stepping back through time: the walls and ceilings are plastered with photos and jerseys and posters and flags, rusted trophies and yellowing knick-knacks crowding every surface in sight.

The hallway down the middle is a gallery lined with newspaper clippings and portraits of past generations of Socceroos, each of them gazing triumphantly out from their frames, watching down over whoever is destined to come after them.

But the back room of the pub is the most magnificent place of all.

The corridor opens into a big empty space of tables and chairs where, no matter which one you sit in, you can see the story of Australian football unfold before your eyes.

Every available wallspace in the "Johnny Warren Museum" is covered in some startling memory or another.

A wall of shimmering pennants from the country's oldest clubs like St George Budapest and Melbourne Hungaria.

A Socceroos jersey signed by every player who competed at the country's first World Cup in 1974.

A wooden cabinet filled with gold brooches worn during Australia's first overseas tours.

Inconspicuous trophies with names and dates from over a century ago rusted into the metal plates.

The room is alive with history, rich with stories of struggle and success, heaving with passion and pride: a museum celebrating not just football, but our country's complex migrant past.

And yet, for the better part of a century, the mythology of Australian football has remained hidden at the end of a quiet road, at the back of a quiet pub: pushed to the side by an Anglo-Australian culture that has, until recently, been suspicious or outright hostile towards whatever didn't look, sound or feel like them.

Warren spent much of his 61 years of life fighting to have football recognised across the country, not only by governments, businesses and media, but also by the wider public.

He and former SBS broadcaster Les Murray, a Hungarian-born migrant who moved to Australia in 1957 and immediately found identity and community through football, became known as "Mr and Mrs Soccer" for their constant advocacy on behalf of the game on programs like The World Game and On The Ball, which brought the international game into Australian homes.

Warren's 2002 book titled "Sheilas, Wogs and Poofters" was one of the first to lay out the deep cultural connections between football and the changing face of Australia after World War II, with the title referring to the common insults those who played the game would receive throughout the mid-20th century.

There have been moments in which the game has threatened to crack through the ceiling of mainstream consciousness: the height of the old National Soccer League, the Socceroos' defeat of Uruguay to break their World Cup curse in 2005, the peak years of the A-League Men.

But football has never really stuck, often pulled backwards by its own cultural self-cannibalism and messy political in-fighting, while also struggling to stay relevant to those who, for one reason or another, believe that our national sport looks and sounds and feels like something else.

And so football has turned inward, trying desperately to keep itself alive; lashing out at all those who would threaten it like a starving, frightened animal backed into a corner.

The women's game has been even more hidden, boxed away in cupboards and offices and garages across the country; so many of its stories surviving only in the memories of the women who were there to see for themselves.

But despite all of that, Warren's faith in the power of the game never wavered. He knew what this sport was capable of, so long as everybody within it saw the same picture.

Before his death from lung cancer in 2004, he was asked what he wanted his legacy to be.

"I told you so," was his now-famous answer.

"We've campaigned for so long, we've beaten against doors of trying to have the game accepted.

As the sun sets on the 2023 Women's World Cup, what would Warren have said as he watched his beloved sport finally capture the hearts and minds of a nation that he always believed it would?

The numbers are one thing: almost 2 million tickets sold; record viewership on television and online streaming; newspapers and TV bulletins splashed with the faces and stories of the Matildas; green-and-gold jerseys swept off the racks by fans old and new.

But the feeling is another thing altogether. There is a feeling that something fundamental has shifted within the sport and as a country, where football has become the thing Warren and so many others always hoped it could be.