Much of the AFL’s blunders are not individually enough to make anyone tear up a club membership card. All of it, together, over three decades, is the accumulated evidence of an organisation that has never once had to answer to the people who fund it. Because every year, regardless of what they do to us, attendance and membership numbers go up anyway. There has not been a real financial consequence for AFL House in living memory.

A sixty-one-point turnaround inside a single game of football is not a form slump or a bad quarter. It is a capitulation, and it deserves to be examined as one rather than filed away under the vague, forgiving language of “we’re disappointed but we’ll move on quickly” that dominates Matthew Nicks’ press conferences.

Showdown 60 was a more complicated game than a lazy ‘Showdowns never go to script’ narrative allows, and Adelaide’s failures were more specific and instructive than a simple 26-point hiding suggests.

The Showdown should matter. Local rivalry is one of the few remaining things in football that still feels human. But when the siren goes, South Australian football has to remember that the enemy is not down or up Port Road. They’re the rivals. They enemy is the system that taught us to spend our deepest anger on each other.

Last night’s Round 3 match between Adelaide and Geelong served as an almost perfect case study for a number of the issues we speak to here at the Thebarton Enquirer. Examples of umpire inadequacy, league mismanagement and clubland gaslighting were all evident.