Saying goodbye to the Port Adelaide Magpies is hard to do, writes Reece Homfray
ANALYSIS: Port Adelaide Magpies played for the guernsey on Sunday in what could have been the team's Alberton Oval farewell.
AT 5.50pm on Sunday, as the sun set on the scoreboard at Alberton Oval, two middle-aged men walked slowly across the ground.
The players were long gone and the only remnants of the raucous crowd that an hour earlier was screaming from the stands were a few kids kicking a footy and a man picking up cans.
When the two men got to the middle of the oval they stopped, reached for their phones and took a photo as if to soak up the iconic ground one last time.
One of them walked to the centre circle, paused and looked at the scuffed grass just as someone would pause to remember a loved one.
In essence that was what a lot of Port Adelaide Magpies supporters were doing on Sunday.
Their team is destined to become the Power's AFL reserves if not next year, then almost certainly by 2015, but the feeling is it will happen sooner rather than later.
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It seems there is no doubt among the players as to when it's coming.
The Port Adelaide reserves finished their game at 2pm and did a lap of honour, high-fiving supporters who leaned over the boundary fence while some in the grandstand gave a standing ovation.
Port Magpies reserves were on the bottom of the ladder before they beat West Adelaide on Sunday. But they might as well have just won the grand final.
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The emotion carried over to the league game and the boundary line fence was no barrier to it overflowing in both directions. The game had everything that makes football great - feeling, physicality, passion and pride.
West Adelaide was playing for a double chance in the finals. The Magpies were playing for the guernsey, for each other and for those supporters who still wear black and white instead of teal, despite both calling the same place home.
By three-quarter-time the Maggies led by one point and the fairytale was going to script.
Retiring captain James Meiklejohn called the players together before coach Ken McGregor arrived and delivered his troops one final rev up.
By the time Meiklejohn had finished talking there were hundreds of supporters forming a giant circle around the players.
It was the type of huddle you see at a country footy grand final when the only way for a supporter to show 'you're either with us or against us' is to stand by your team.
Despite still leading late in the last quarter, Port's fairytale didn't come true and West Adelaide won by four points.
But it sparked amazing scenes at the ground. As the triumphant Bloods marched off the ground to the cheer of their own supporters, the bigger noise was happening behind them.
Meiklejohn again called his teammates together in the middle of the ground and what was said is destined to stay among those 21 players.
He didn't have long to talk because no sooner had he started, the Magpie army had arrived again.
Players posed for photos, signed autographs and hugged fans - children and adults alike.
They then lifted Meiklejohn - who has spent the past nine years at the club and four as captain - and carried him from the ground.
It would have been fitting if every player could have been chaired from the ground because in some ways that's what Meiklejohn has wanted.
He doesn't want to see his team disappear but he's a realist who knows that if they must, then at least the players and supporters should be given the chance to say goodbye.
And that's what they got yesterday.
When the team went down the race, fans chanted 'Magpies' and broke into the clubsong.
But when that finished they looked at each other as if not knowing what to do next, so quietly dispersed.
It's a bit like the feeling at Alberton at the moment whereby everyone knows what's coming, but just not what or when exactly.
In all likelihood, Sunday was the last time we will see the Port Adelaide Magpies in their true sense grace Alberton Oval.
The Power says its reserves team will still be called the Magpies if it enters the SANFL next year but how much that means to Magpies supporters remains to be seen.
On Sunday they still cheered Ben Newton, John Butcher and Jake Neade - who are all Power players - as if they were their own.
Only next year, there'll be more of them. A lot more.
So should supporters feel angry, sad, disgruntled, cheated?
Meiklejohn made a good point last week when he said fans could be angry at the club or the SANFL but it would achieve nothing.
This is happening whether they like it or not.
You can hardly begrudge the Power for wanting its own reserves team given next year its 17 AFL opponents will have theirs.
And at the end of the day, Port Adelaide Football Club moved to the AFL 16 years ago so this day could be seen as inevitable, even more so when the two united under the 'One Club' banner.
Granted that not everyone agreed with the decision to join the AFL in 1997 and some Port Adelaide Magpies fans chose not to support the Power at all.
But it was still the football club's decision and such a decision is rarely unanimous among the fans anyway.
Now Port Adelaide wants an AFL and SANFL team on its own terms, and why shouldn't it want that?
That's how Port Adelaide has always played its football - you don't win 36 premierships without being bold.
A decision for Port Adelaide to field an AFL reserves team in the SANFL - albeit at the expense of the current Magpies players and supporters - is seen to be made in the greater good of a club which competes in the biggest competition in the country.
It should make no excuses for any decision that puts coach Ken Hinkley and his players closer to winning an AFL premiership.
That doesn't make it any easier for Magpies fans to accept, but at least as Meiklejohn rightly pointed out, his team and its fans had the chance to say goodbye.
And like the two men who walked across Alberton Oval just before dark on Sunday night, they will never forget what their football club is built on.
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