IN the second week of May 1870 - perhaps on the 12th but certainly no later than the 13th - the Port Adelaide Cricket and Football Club was founded.

Port Adelaide - the football club that has become a bright symbol of achievement along an estuary the Kaurna people called "land of sleep or death" - is 152 years old this week.

No SANFL club is older. In the AFL, only the game's original club of Melbourne (1858) and the pioneer clubs of Geelong (1859), Carlton (1864) and North Melbourne (1869) have longer stories.

For worldwide context, the Port Adelaide Football Club was in its 27th year when Pierre de Coubertin revived the Olympic Games in Athens in 1896; it precedes John Pemberton developing Coca-Cola by 16 years; and it is older than the English and American sporting powerhouses that share the Port Adelaide enviable record for success, Manchester United (1878) and the New York Yankees (1901).

There was a Port Adelaide Football Club - for six years - before there was the telephone. Today, many will watch Port Adelaide games from many points of the world on their mobile phones. Just as the phone has changed, so has Port Adelaide, as a district and as a football club.

Port Adelaide is 152.

(Please do not send greeting cards to club president David Koch and chief executive Matthew Richardson; they have enough to read at a time when Port Adelaide is expanding again, this time to add a women's team to the AFLW national league).

This is not about living in the past. Rather, it is an apt time for reflection. Matthew Richardson does have a sage theme in these times, often noting, "You have to know where you have been to know where you are going."

Across 152 years the Port Adelaide Football Club has become far more than envisioned by three leading citizens of the Port Adelaide community - Albert Rann, George Henry Ireland and Richard William John Leicester - on April 20, 1870 when they met at North Parade to contemplate starting a social club for the local young men.

By the second week of May, it was all very formal. The advertisements in the Adelaide newspapers of May 13, 1870 read:

The next day - at John Hart's family estate, Buck's Flat at Glanville - it all began with the first formal training session for a game that still had no official league in South Australia and no uniform rule book. But there was ambition as football over-rode everything, including the cricket.

In the 19th century, Port Adelaide was at the Prince Alfred Hotel in the city as a foundation club to start an organised football competition in South Australia (the SA Football Association); in the 20th, the club boldly stepped forward to represent South Australia on the national stage (in the Australian Football League); and in the 21st, Port Adelaide took Australian football to the world ...

Along the way, Port Adelaide has become Australia's most successful football club with 37 senior premierships across the SANFL and AFL; four Champions of Australia titles and three flags from war-time competitions. Hence, it is a club that exists to win premierships.

Port Adelaide continues to aspire to be ultra-successful, as currently stated with its "Chasing Greatness" campaign. This mission to win three premierships by the end of 2025 lives to Liverpool legend Bill Shankly's vision that if you "aim for the sky, you'll reach the ceiling ... aim for the ceiling and you'll stay on the floor."

It is the Port Adelaide way "Since 1870" - and that in 1970, as the first club in South Australian league football to celebrate its centenary, declared it was "Proud of the Past. Confident of the Future".

"Port Adelaide has put it all out there - three flags in five years," says club great Brian Cunningham who played 256 SANFL games from 1971-1983 and was chief executive from 1992 (at the start of the second chase for an AFL licence) to the breakthrough AFL premiership in 2004.

"I do like it. They are strong enough to take the risk in saying exactly what they want - and expect - to achieve. That is the Port Adelaide I know."

Plenty certainly happens in the second week of May to define the Port Adelaide Football Club.

In 1877, the second week of May presented Port Adelaide's first game - and win - in the new South Australian Football Association: 1-0 against Kensington at Kensington Oval (at a time when only goals counted).

In 1880, the second week of May ended with Port Adelaide playing - and winning - its first official match at the new (and forever spiritual) home at Alberton Oval, again with Kensington as the rival.

And on the club's 147th anniversary of the first training session at Glanville on May 14, 1870, Port Adelaide was playing in Shanghai, China. A year earlier, then Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull had made the formal announcement that Port Adelaide would be the first AFL club to organise a game for premiership points outside Australia and New Zealand.

Port Adelaide is a club of its time and beyond its time.

The Port Adelaide Football Club is defined across 152 years by its ambition - and a sense of responsibility to "make our community proud". For one and a half centuries the people of Port Adelaide have carried their allegiance to their local football club as a badge of honour - and have felt honoured by the club's achievements on and off the football field.

Messrs. Rann, Ireland and Leicester would have never imagined as much as has been achieved by the seed they planted in April 1870. The Port Adelaide Football Club they created in the second week of May 1870 for the Port Adelaide district ultimately has become a beacon of admiration beyond its boundaries of the LeFevre peninsula and among its rivals.

As Sturt champion Tony Clarkson wrote in 1988 when South Australian football was at the crossroads: "Port Adelaide has always seemed to me to be the benchmark of SA football. Its achievements stand as a high mark to which other clubs may aspire. They are progressive, determined to succeed, ready to innovate, quick to learn, intensely competitive, never beaten and totally disciplined. Players, administrators and supporters are fiercely loyal, even to the point of pig-headedness.

"Every other football club and supporter in Adelaide yearns for the success of Port Adelaide, admires them and at the same time hates them with ferocious intensity. We need more Port Adelaides in South Australia ..."

Since the second week of May in 1870, there has been only one Port Adelaide Football Club.

Happy anniversary Port Adelaide.