EVERYONE wants to define - and list - Port Adelaide's best 22.

It is understandable, in an old-fashioned way. For years the commentary on football line-ups has been to believe in a settled, cohesive 22 - everyone knowing each other's traits, finding comfort in the second nature of the same 22, week after week.

If AFL Season 2021 has left a mark to challenge old, traditional concepts - and modern list management - it is the "squad mentality" developed at Port Adelaide.

First, it was out of perceptive concern for how 2021 football would drain players with the return to 22 home-and-away fixtures and 20-minute quarters - while working with smaller squads - after the COVID-shortened seasons and games of last season.

Every Port Adelaide player, the message was during the pre-season, was to adapt to two positions and be flexible enough to play them both in one game. All-Australian key forward Charlie Dixon can work centre ruck. Should-be All-Australian midfielder Ollie Wines can work in the goalsquare.

It has been a critically effective game-day strategy for Port Adelaide this season in which Ken Hinkley's team has achieved a 16-5 win-loss record, the best (for a 22-game qualifying season) since the premiership breakthrough of 2004.

But it also has been a concept that has allowed Port Adelaide to ride a heavy injury wave to be a top-four finisher and perhaps a top-two starter to next month's finals.

Port Adelaide has used the medical substitute more than others in a season when Hinkley has:

FIELDED 35 players,

HAD just six players in every game - Sydney recruit Aliir Aliir, game-breaking midfielder Karl Amon, club champion Darcy Byrne-Jones, Dixon, captain Tom Jonas and vice-captain Wines,

BLOODED five first-year players - Rising Star nominee Miles Bergman, academy graduates Lachie Jones and Martin Frederick, mid-season draftee Jed McEntee and Dylan Williams.

The squad mentality had been proven - timely and most prudent in a season of ever-changing challenges posed by injury and COVID protocols.

Usually, the longer the run without seeing "unchanged" on the team sheet suggests a team is in trouble. But Port Adelaide's squad mentality underlines a team not only needs to be flexible during a game but from match to match.

Port Adelaide is not about a "best 22" but the best 23-man line-up for the occasion. This should make for some powerful match committee meetings during the finals and give Hinkley and his coaching staff more power during matches when everyone is looking at a coach for a Plan B (and C, D and E).

Amid adversity - such as the recent loss of small forwards that put McEntee on the team sheet against St Kilda at the Docklands in Melbourne in mid-July - Port Adelaide has gained from being creative in selection.

At the start of the season, the question was: Can Port Adelaide play three tall forwards in Dixon, Todd Marshall and Rising Star nominee Mitch Georgiades? Now it is successfully and eagerly playing four with the introduction of back-up ruckman Peter Ladhams to the attack.

This is the era of new thinking. A time when "best 22" is becoming as old school as team line-ups of six three-man lines filling 18 positions (more so when Carlton names Eddie Betts at centre half-forward).

It is not the best 22 that will win the AFL premiership. It is the best squad.

All we need now is for the AFL - like so many major sporting bodies - to recognise this with more than 23 premiership medals on grand final day.