OFFICIALLY, the public moment that changed the Port Adelaide Football Club forever - and Australian football - was at West Lakes on a Tuesday afternoon. December 13, 1994.

The private phone call from Leigh Whicker's office at SANFL headquarters, however, was five days earlier on a fateful Friday. It left Port Adelaide president Greg Boulton and chief executive Brian Cunningham with an unexpected curveball - keeping a Port Adelaide team in the State league. This was the last hurdle to AFL status. There is the ironic twist that for Port Adelaide to leave the SANFL it had to stay in the SANFL. 

"Actually," says Boulton, 30 years later, "that phone call (revealing Port Adelaide's success in securing an AFL licence) was even earlier than Leigh's call ... we already knew what Leigh was going to tell us."

From AFL House at the MCG in Melbourne had come the advice to be prepared.

"The message," recalls Boulton, "was the new sub-licence to be issued by the SANFL on behalf of the AFL will be handed to a club with two words to its name ... they did not say 'Port Adelaide' but 'a club with two words to its name'."

The hyphenated campaigns for the second SA-based AFL licence, could be dismissed.

Norwood-Sturt, the major rival, it would not be.

Boulton could cast aside the late play from Glenelg-South Adelaide. He could also scratch "The Cartel" formed by the other SANFL clubs of Central District, North Adelaide, West Adelaide and Woodville-West Torrens.

Port Adelaide - after the torment of an ambitious but blocked campaign for national status in 1990 - would be an AFL club. The SANFL's oldest club was finally advancing to the national stage. And now, in mid-December 1994, after two years of intense campaigning, Whicker was on the phone to confirm such ... and with an unexpected twist that emphasised how important the Port Adelaide image was to the SANFL.

Thirty years on, those five days between Friday, December 9, 1994 and Tuesday, December 13, 1994 stand as important as any to understanding the spirit and character of the Port Adelaide Football Club and its people.

"There would be a Port Adelaide Football Club forever," says Boulton, repeating his famous line to the members gathered in celebration at Alberton  that Tuesday night.

"Our survival - at a time when South Australian football was massively changed by putting an AFL team in Adelaide in 1990 - was assured forever.

"But we did not want to just survive. We wanted to play in the best competition in the land. We wanted to thrive and succeed among the best. We achieved that opportunity in 1994 - and 10 years later we celebrated again with an AFL premiership."

From the moment the SANFL opened the door on December 2, 1992 for an AFL licence bidding process until the formal declaration of the winner on December 13, 1994, the contest always seemed for Port Adelaide to win.

"Not because we were on any promise," says Cunningham, again rejecting the perception the AFL "owed" Port Adelaide for breaking the long-standing impasse with the SANFL by seeking a licence in 1990.

From March 8, 1993, Port Adelaide's dedicated AFL sub-committee met twice a week to plan a winning bid and to raise at least $2 million to ensure it was never beaten, by a rival SANFL club or lawyers as in 1990.

"Why would we spend five years working our backsides off to enter the AFL  if we were on a promise? The reality is, another composite club in South Australia would not have worked. But we had to work hard - and we did - to prove Port Adelaide was the right choice, as it clearly was."

But what if 1990 had repeated with Port Adelaide denied?

"There was no contingency plan," says Boulton. "It never crossed our minds that we would fail to get that licence."

But what if ...

"We would have continued to dominate the SANFL," says Boulton.

That is the Port Adelaide way.