More than a couple of years after the COVID pandemic began to wreak havoc across the globe, we're still getting our heads around the extent of the lifestyle changes it has brought.
Health and hygiene issues aren't being treated so flippantly in affluent societies anymore. There's also more caution about public interaction. And that one has plenty of ramifications for professional sport.
AFL football had years of uninterrupted growth and rising crowds. Obviously, that has changed post-COVID, but it's taken the return of any sort of live audience for the game to get an idea of just how much.
So far in season 2022, the average attendance per game is 31,005, down from 37,250 in 2019, which, apart from the last two COVID-affected seasons, is the lowest figure since 1995, close enough to 30 years.
The AFL isn't panicking, pointing to restricted crowds at Perth Stadium and GMHBA Stadium and the impact of vaccine mandates and other health and safety protocols as likely explanations. Instead, it is counting on initiatives such as a "kids free" month later this season when children up to the age of 14 will be given free admission to all games.
So far in season 2022, the average attendance per game is 31,005, down from 37,250 in 2019, which, apart from the last two COVID-affected seasons, is the lowest figure since 1995, close enough to 30 years.
Good on them for that. But it's important at the same time that the AFL consider explanations for the crowd drop beyond just the pandemic. Like, for example, whether enough people are finding enough about the game to attract them in spite of the extra efforts required to go.
Premiership coach turned media commentator Mick Malthouse has speculated that over-officiating and widespread supporter anger at more recent rule changes are behind the fall. He cited the "stand" and 6-6-6 rules, the nominating of ruckmen, delayed boundary throw-ins, and this year's most controversial change, the crackdown on umpire dissent, as largely overreactions which had turned fans away.
"We need our game returned to a style that people can relate to, enjoy, and barrack for. People don't need an excuse to extend their habits of the last two years and stay home," he wrote. "The sanitisation of the rules has had a massive impact on people falling out of love with the game. We need them to fall in love with it again."
Perhaps he has a point. But another factor I suspect isn't helping is a season in which the competition doesn't appear quite as tight as to what we've become accustomed, both in terms of the ladder and in individual games.
While Melbourne is clearly the AFL's dominant team right now, having won its last 16 games (including last year), things are looking pretty crook at the other end of the ladder.
North Melbourne and West Coast at the moment are cannon fodder. The Eagles have lost their last five games by 63, 84, 109, 75 and 74 points. The Roos have lost seven in a row, the last five of those by 68, 60, 50, 78 and 69 points.
The bottom four on the ladder, including Essendon and GWS, have just six wins between them after nine rounds, the least to this stage in any season for a decade.
And one-sided contests in 2022 aren't only confined to the bottom four. Seven of the nine games in round nine last weekend were decided by 30 points or more. And there seems to be more lopsided games going on the deeper we go into the season.
We've had 81 games so far in 2022. Twenty of those, just on a quarter, have had winning margins of 50 points or more. Interestingly, a lot of them have come in the last few weeks. After four rounds, there had been just five margins of 50 or more points. Over the last five rounds, we've seen 15 of them.
Worse still, in many of those, the winning team has done most of the damage early before holding its opponent at arms' length. It's not making for a great spectacle.
Are the losing teams beaten before they start? Lacking the self-belief to think they can retrieve a deficit once they fall behind? Or both?
Either way, if teams are effectively giving up less than halfway through the season, you shudder to think how uncompetitive things might become once we get to July and August.
That's hardly going to inspire more people to shrug off their current indifference and march through the turnstiles again.
It's not like season 2022 doesn't have much to recommend it, none the least a very different-looking ladder on which Fremantle and Carlton currently sit inside the top four and the likes of a younger, exciting Sydney team and St Kilda are inside the eight.
But storylines on their own aren't enough.
The product itself must be compelling.
One-sided games and officiating, which provokes severe frustration among the fan base, aren't that, even in more stable times.
And as the world continues to grapple with what an unprecedented pandemic means for how we live, and as fewer people attend live sport as a consequence, any possible explanation should be enough to spark appropriate concern among those who administer our game, too.
