It said everything about Wight the footballer - athleticism, commitment, fierce competitive spirit, and the rare capabilities required to thwart Ablett at the peak of his powers.
I returned to the photo last Sunday, trying to equate the magnificent imagery in front of me with the gut-wrenching memory of what I had seen just two days earlier, during 30 minutes with Wight and his mother, Peggy, in the Freemasons Hospital.
He knew and we knew he had just days to go. Cancer had ravaged the once magnificent body and broken his spirit along the way.
Diagnosed with lung cancer in February, he is dead before June ends. He was 47.
I took him some photos last Friday, images he deserved to see before he departed this world. Dignified pictures of him, beautiful images of him with his mother and sister, Gwen, for a story in the
Herald Sun on May 14.
Gwen was in the air coming from Ireland yesterday morning when he passed.
He was peaceful on Friday, as if he had accepted his fate. Perhaps he was simply too tired and weak to do anything more than nod or offer a faint smile.
It had been a mere six weeks since we discussed his battle for life for more than an hour, for the report. He had been disappointed and confused back then, perhaps a little angry, too.
He was still coming to terms with the fact an irritating cough had been the precursor to a rampant tumour in his lung.
After getting the fateful call from his doctor, Bernie Crimmins, in February - "You better come in and see me" - he saw an X-ray that showed a lump the size of an orange sitting in his right lung.
"I've just fallen off a cliff," he recalled.
Despite promising results from the first applications of radiation and chemotherapy, he wasn't going to recover.
Jim Stynes, his partner in football's great adventure of the 1980s - the Irish experiment - was terribly sad yesterday.
Stynes himself is battling cancer, but it's the end of their incredible shared journey that makes Wight's passing so painful for him.
He saw his friend for the last time at a fund-raiser at the Bentleigh Club on June 11. Wight arrived in a wheelchair, while Stynes was out of hospital for an hour after his latest surgery.
"That was just a very sad night," Stynes said.
"Seeing him at the stage he was at was extremely sad. He had deteriorated so quickly. You just knew. It was just horrible. He was such a talent, Sean."
Said Stynes: "We've always had a close affinity because of where we came from, and a healthy respect for one another, even though we went our own ways as life went on.
"He was probably the most gifted athlete I've ever known, because he was good at everything. Except for swimming - he swam like an anchor."
Wight played 150 games for Melbourne from 1985-95, including the 1988 Grand Final.