Port Adelaide fans have repeatedly donned the black and white in the stands over the years, showing their passion and desire to wear the bars. Image: AFL Photos.

EMPTY the two suitcases Greg Boulton and Brian Cunningham wheeled into SANFL headquarters at West Lakes in 1994 with Port Adelaide's bid papers for an AFL licence and fill them with everything that has been written, said and assumed of the club's desire to wear its traditional black-and-white bars on the national stage.

And then fill both vessels again.

And again .... and again.

If the football world has learned anything of the Port Adelaide Football Club through time, since 1870, it is to never underestimate how determined and driven its people are to get what they want.

Never, ever give up.

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The Bars are Back | PTV

Port Adelaide will wear its iconic black-and-white Prison Bar guernsey in the Round 3 Showdown.

Taking Port Adelaide to the national competition - with a club-defining bid in 1990 - was ordained by the constitutional demand to play in the best competition available. From 1877 it was the SANFL, of which Port Adelaide was a founding member to the first formalised major league for Australian football.

From 1986, when the VFL opened the path for national expansion, it has been the AFL.

It took six challenging years - and a Supreme Court hearing - to put Port Adelaide on the national stage (where it has advanced all its traditions bar one).

Taking the black-and-white jumper that has embodied Port Adelaide's heart and soul since 1902 is a demand of the club's fans.

Port Adelaide has rarely worn the black-and-white bars in its 594 official AFL premiership matches - just five times since 1997 to be precise, the last time at an "empty" Adelaide Oval in 2020, the club's 150th anniversary year. Only twice has Port Adelaide worn the bars as a "heritage round" guernsey, in 2003 and 2007; many more times it has been denied the seemingly natural right to wear black and white to honour its past.

But at every AFL game in Adelaide, interstate or abroad (ala Shanghai, China) where at least one Port Adelaide supporter has turned up with the bars guernsey - and worn it with pride and as a statement of desire.

The fans want Port Adelaide in the bars.

Port Adelaide fans wave a Prison Bar flag at Adelaide Oval. Image: AFL Photos.

They will have their wish answered next month when Port Adelaide hosts the 53rd Showdown derby at Adelaide Oval. And they will want this to be the norm for all derbies. They have overfilled Greg Boulton and Brian Cunningham's two suitcases with their petitions. They have overloaded social media with their polls that underline their desire for the bars to be part of their players' arsenal. They have given a powerful vision to their dream by repeatedly wearing the bars in the stands. 

This is a major turn from the club's annual meeting at the Railways Hotel at Port Adelaide on Wednesday, March 26, 1902 when the members were told the dyes required to maintain the premiership-winning colours of magenta and blue were "impossible to procure". The majority insisted the club persist, but on April 28 at the SA Football Association meeting at the Prince Alfred Hotel in the city, Port Adelaide formally registered its new colours of black and white.

The bars jumper - with the horizontal white bar on top of the vertical black-and-white stripes - is unlike any other sporting apparel. It is a mystery. Who designed it? Where was the inspiration? Does the jumper find its inspiration from the pylons of the Port Adelaide docks? 

Not in doubt is the passion it inspires in those who wear it. 

Nor the power former Collingwood president Eddie McGuire commanded for almost three decades to deny the Port Adelaide fans the right to see their team in the jumper that best reflected their club.

It took Port Adelaide 25 years of competition in the SANFL to find the jumper that defined its club to be like no other.

It has taken a year longer of running around the AFL to find the appropriate place for the tradition to continue - Showdowns, the match that defines the great divide in SA football: Port Adelaide and The Rest.

The complete contrast from obsession from Port Adelaide fans to the dismissive angst from supporters among The Rest tells why the bars fit perfectly in the Showdown.

At Collingwood today there are three men who appreciate the theme. President Jeff Browne was the VFL's legal counsel when Port Adelaide stood apart from The Rest to become an AFL participant from South Australia.

Chief executive Craig Kelly hails from the Norwood Football Club that gave the jumper its "prison bars" name - a backhander that many Port Adelaide fans wear on their black-and-white guernseys as a badge of honour.

And coach Craig McRae knows from his brother, a Port Adelaide supporter, just how passionate the fans are for the bars.

The landscape has changed dramatically. There is a tone of appreciation - rather than resistance - towards the bars and their power among a fan base.

Jason Horne-Francis pictured in Port Adelaide's iconic black-and-white Prison Bar guernsey. Image: Matt Sampson.

Across a quarter of a century, with the greatest lesson being in 2010-2012 more so than during the COVID pandemic, the Port Adelaide Football Club has been reminded by its fans how the path to the AFL could not be taken without honouring and living to the SANFL traditions that made the club great.

The bars jumper is as important as the club's name: Port Adelaide.

Each is a calling card for the club's fans. We are Port Adelaide. We are the bars.

We are proud of our past. Without it, there is no future. 

Translating Port Adelaide's SANFL past to an AFL future has been as challenging as winning any premiership. How does Port Adelaide honour the past without being trapped in history? The great lesson from 2012 is that chilling reminder from the traditional fans that they will not endorse a club that ignores - or more to the point, does not respect - its past.

Port Adelaide can be progressive as it was in 1990 with the AFL bid.

Port Adelaide can be ambitious as it was in 2014 by putting on the agenda the vision of AFL premiership matches in China.

But Port Adelaide - the fans insist - must remain true to its core values that are captured by the mystique and power of the black-and-white bars.

The moment is right. Showdowns.

The derby is better for it. The Port Adelaide Football Club is better for it. The club's fans are better for it. And in 2023 such a trilogy is much needed for a game finding its feet after a costly pandemic.

After three decades of misplaced debate, the suitcases can now be usefully filled with 23 bars jumpers to take from Alberton to Adelaide Oval to make the Showdown a powerful statement on South Australian football. It is not about living in the past; it is about carrying the game's valued history to the future. Even Collingwood gets it.