Port Adelaide has never been idle in SA football since 1877 when it was at the table at the (now lost) Prince Alfred Hotel by the city Town Hall as a foundation member of the SA Football Association (now SANFL).

Even when the SA Football League stopped from 1916-18 during World War I, Port Adelaide kept playing - to maintain morale at home and to raise funds for the soldiers. It won the first two premierships of the three-season SA Patriotic Football League.

Friday night - against West Adelaide at Richmond Oval - was to have marked the 102nd consecutive season of Port Adelaide playing in the SANFL, either as "the Magpies" or in partnership with West Torrens from 1942-1944 during World War II. And the count would have stretched to 144 consecutive seasons of playing in some State-based competition - with a premiership on the line - in Adelaide.

The SANFL's shutdown - until at least May 31 - by the COVID-19 pandemic certainly gives the Port Adelaide football community an unexpected "preview" of life without the "Magpies" or a Port Adelaide presence in the State league.

Amid the uncertainty of how deep the fall-out to all Australian football will be with COVID-19 - and the news of AFL club Carlton cutting ties with its VFL affiliate, the Northern Blues (once the Preston Football Club in the Victorian Football Association) - the headlines brought into question (again) the future of any Port Adelaide presence in the SANFL.

All the alarming reactions should have cleared away with some reflection on this telling remark by AFL chief executive Gillon McLachlan during his interview with SEN morning host Gerard Whateley:

"The alignment of the structures underpinning (Australian football) all the way to the AFL ... there's always been people in each section (of the game) saying this does not quite work.

"There's an opportunity to get that alignment from community football and the talent pathways and school footy and the VFL, all the way to the AFL. There is an opportunity to get a better alignment of that. That is something that is emerging; something the guys (at AFL House) are working on.."

Far from another deathknell for the Magpies, this could be the moment that keeps Port Adelaide in the SANFL for many generations.

The game's unexpected pause does allow for this question to be dealt with: If Australian football could start all over again, how would it look?

Since the 1980s - starting with VFL club South Melbourne's move to Sydney in 1982 - the much-wanted national competition for Australia's indigenous game has been built with gradual and constant change. It has been more evolution by compromise rather than growth through strategy.

The timeline from 1987 reads: More AFL teams (six) to ultimately ensure there is at least one AFL game played in every mainland State each weekend. The demise of the VFL reserves followed by alignment to long-standing VFA clubs in the new VFL. A standalone under-18 competition, primarily in Victoria, to serve as the audition ground for the AFL draft system. Academies for the four AFL clubs north of the Murray.

And each add-on does not always fit perfectly nor leave a classic pyramid with the AFL system sitting as the peak of co-ordinated base at the grassroots of Australian football. It is not even a sport with a universal rule book from league to league, state to state.

It is not as, to use McLachlan's word, perfectly aligned as American football with its clear-cut pathway from high school football to college football and then the professional National Football League.

Australian football had it this way once. Each major league - the VFL, SANFL and WAFL, in particular - had clubs with recruiting zones and clear pathways to the top flight.

Today, there is a jumble. But there is the chance to clean up 40 years of "un-aligned" growth and to restore Australian football to its meaningful community-based roots.

It is now highly unlikely that the AFL will push on with its grand draft plan to develop the "D League", the national under-23s reserves competition. This series would have made it difficult for Port Adelaide to be "the Magpies" or to wear black-and-white stripes while Collingwood put its Magpie reserves in black-and-white stripes in the AFL's second-tier competition. And it would have been a strain even before the COVID financial crisis in football for Port Adelaide to run two secondary teams, one in each of the AFL D-League and the SANFL.

When the AFL plans for Season 2021, there is expected to be - by the financial pressure on the AFL from the COVID shutdown - a cut in the size of AFL lists, predicted at 35 with a dramatically cut salary cap that next year was to have been $13,273,522 plus $1,194,555 in third-party agreements.

So the key question is: How best to set up an AFL club's football program?

What if Port Adelaide (and every AFL club) had this form of alignment, state by state:

• AFL squad - made up of 35 contracted players
• State league team - staffed by AFL-listed players not picked for AFL action (at most 13 if there was no injury list) and at least 25 SANFL-contracted players
• No State league reserves team
• State league under-18 squad in the form of an academy group. These teenagers would need to nominate for the national draft pool to play in the AFL.
• Suburban and country recruiting zones to underpin the club's State league program, in both the SANFL league competition and under-18 series - and to force every AFL team to invest in community football.

The result would be AFL teams resembling football clubs of the pre-national era: Connected from the grassroots and a local community to the big time on the national stage.

Port Adelaide's State league squad would be a hybrid AFL-SANFL unit built on AFL draftees and locally developed players selected from a traditional recruiting zone. This allows the Port Adelaide Football Club to remain true to its history of developing footballers on both the LeFevre and Eyre peninsulas - and being firmly bonded to the communities in both zones.

Some might say, such a concept makes everything old new again.

AFL football clubs would be more than just an elite unit for the national league.

COVID-19 might just give the AFL the moment to realign its 18 AFL teams to the traditional format of Australian football clubs - and would ensure Port Adelaide's continued presence in the SANFL is as important as ever.

MEMBERS v FANS

EVERY year there is the confusion on how to define a member at an AFL club, particularly at the end of July when the league's audit of membership numbers can deliver vastly different counts to the 18 league clubs' figures.

This debate has changed significantly this year to give a stronger definition of a club member - and greater appreciation of member contribution to a club's sustainability.

A member - without question - is devoted to the football club to understand they are paying membership dues to underwrite their football club ... and not just for a seat at the games.

To quote Collingwood president Eddie McGuire from last week's hot live cross in the Channel Nine (Melbourne) nightly news service: "It’s as simple as this ... if you don’t have members, you don’t have a club. A club that has no members is a memory ... 

“You put your money in, and it goes there because you believe in an institution. It’s not just a (financial) transactional .... it’s about the emotion.”

AFL chief executive Gillon McLachlan recognises that for many Australians (more than one million) "the footy club is almost part of their family". He adds: "I know our members understand how big their contribution of membership is to their clubs.

"Clearly the footy clubs rely on club membership. And for those who have been making a contribution because of that connection and that loyalty for such a long time, if they're able to keep their membership, it goes a long way to keeping the club sustainable."

As Port Adelaide Football Club chief executive Keith Thomas told the membership last week: "We received a full membership renewal from a lapsed member who decided to put aside his uncertainty about the team’s performance, simply to support the club through this difficult time."

A member has a sense of ownership of his football club and be devoted to its future, on and off the field.

A fan - by contrast - will pay an annual fee to be guaranteed entry to the home matches.

AFL clubs signing up fans by free "membership" offers, to "engage" these fans' by filling their email inboxes with notices from the club (and offers from sponsors), is a handy play to boost membership numbers.

But the events of the past month with supporters opening their wallets to buy memberships - even if there is no game to watch until at least June 1 - further highlight the symbolic difference between "members" and "fans".

Understanding how to count members is clearer now. And their status as the "lifeblood" of any football club is greater appreciated too.

TAKE IT TO THE BANK

Five things we have learned in the past week

1)

Experienced Port Adelaide midfielder Tom Rockliff had just too much fun in self-isolation.

All of Port Adelaide's travel party to Queensland for the AFL premiership-season opener against Gold Coast on March 21 - including Rockliff - was forced into 14-day isolation on the return to Adelaide while the South Australian State government prepared to lock the borders.

Rockliff's two-week video show - on social media feed Twitter - with his "young fella" (three-year-old son Jack) proves the 2014 All-Australian is creative in more ways than just crafting a clearance in heavy traffic on the football field.

As team-mate, former Port Adelaide captain Travis Boak, noted: "You don't just pick up those Wiggles moves overnight ..."

2)

Another saga begins as to whether Port Adelaide will continue in the SANFL. This brings out emotional pleas of "say it ain't so", not only from the club's devotees but notable rivals such as Australian Football Hall of Famer, Graham Cornes.

As the Glenelg premiership coach and inaugural Crows AFL coach wrote in his Advertiser column at the weekend: "Even those of us who have loathed the (Port Adelaide Football Club) and waged war with them over the decades can't imagine a football life (without Port Adelaide in the SANFL)."

This certainly makes a mockery of the email sent out earlier in the year by the Glenelg Football Club that began with the line: "The SANFL was originally a fiercely competitive tribal competition, that was until the two local AFL clubs became involved either directly or indirectly but by association."

One of these clubs has been there since the SANFL's foundation in 1877 (44 years before Glenelg was admitted to the league). And with its noted "them against us" theme, Port Adelaide has defined tribalism in football.

3)

When Collingwood Football Club president Eddie McGuire can melt down in his bread-and-butter forum - a live television cross with Channel Nine - it becomes more than obvious how draining the COVID-19-related crisis is on the game's leaders.

4)

To understand the power of a football club on a community  - and the dreams that are carried by young players to represent the league football club in their neighbourhood - tune into Timmy's Time Machine. Premiership captain Tim Ginever's stroll down memory lane with team-mate Mark Tylor underlines what has been lost in the professional era in which teenagers repeatedly say they "just wanted to be drafted" to the AFL rather than a club.

Tylor, the 174-game, 395-goal Ken Farmer Medallist (as the league's leading goalkicker, twice), grew up at Osborne in the Port Adelaide "heartland" on the LeFevre peninsula. He speaks to Ginever of the "want and desire to be involved" at Port Adelaide.

5)

Port Adelaide premiership midfielder Kane Cornes' hitlist has grown to include former Australian, NSW Origin and Penrith rugby league hardman Mark Geyer. Who was it who said, "The apple doesn't fall far from the tree"?

NEXT

We remain on hold ... until at least June 1.