To put that in further perspective, that equates to just one in about 166 players who get from one to 300. There's plenty of fanfare about Thompson's achievement, but given the historical rarity of the feat, perhaps the mother of all fusses should be in order?

That might have been the case 40 years ago. But it seems there's never been a better time to be a veteran. Thompson becomes the eighth active player with 300 or more games experience. With Hawthorn champion Sam Mitchell and beloved Geelong star Jimmy Bartel both due to notch 300 in the next fortnight, that will make 10 current players to have reached the milestone, more than one in eight of all those to have got to footy's blue label for longevity.

It's not an entirely new phenomenon either. If Mitchell and Bartel are included, 42 of the 77 300-gamers will have played since the turn of the century. Have you noticed a trend?

So why the boom? Well, for one thing, the season is longer. It wasn't until 1970 that the fixture was extended to 22 games per club, meaning that players in the past five decades have had a distinct advantage compared with their predecessors. There are also more clubs, meaning more players and more finals, all factors that boost games figures. But there's more to it.

Former Essendon and Carlton big man Justin Madden is one of the tiny fraction of players to have made it to 300, taking to the field 332 times across 17 seasons. Brother Simon played 378 games for the Bombers, and the pair remain the only brothers to have both reached 300 games. Both Simon and Justin served as players' association presidents, so not surprisingly Justin recognises that commercial considerations play a part in the proliferation of footballers hanging around for so long.

"I think that the age of professionalism has meant that there's an incentive to keep playing, which is not just about the number of games but also reasonable remuneration," says Madden, a former state Labor MP.

"If you're a professional footballer, what do you do after you stop playing footy? Well, you probably take a bit of a pay cut whatever you do.

"You got back to working as a barista, you're not going to get that sort of income in tips."

But it's not the only change that has come with the times. Rather lost in the fallout of the Essendon supplements saga is that clubs are generally working harder and smarter when it comes to the management of their players. Tailored loads and recoveries are common practice, with punitive training practices anachronistic. Certainly that's Madden's view. "I think professionalism has also meant that there was a lot more around you to keep you going, so that's the staffing, the sports science, the recuperation, the ice baths, and then also potentially the interchange.

"The interchange has meant that you can keep playing and get breaks at the right stages of games throughout the course of your career that you might not have had the opportunity to get in decades gone by.

"You get chances to recover through the course of a game, which you may not have had a decade or so ago.

"The other element is the whole concept of recovery. Once upon a time the coach just flogged you, and when you lost they flogged you even more. Nowadays, with that professionalism, there's an enormous amount of recognition that players at a particular stage of their career have got a pretty good endurance base, a reasonable foundation of endurance … they don't necessarily need to train nearly as hard as some of the less mature players."

Madden says the lessons are readily learnt from other sports. "You just look at the endurance athletes like the marathon runners at the Olympics, they're not young athletes, they have an endurance foundation which has taken years to establish. So if you'[ve been playing football from a very young age and you're more of the sort of midfielder-type endurance athlete, there's probably every chance that if you survive without significant structural or contact injuries then you've probably got a fairly substantial endurance base to carry you through the tail end of your career without having to train at the rate of young players."

And there's good reason for clubs to work hard on keeping their experienced players going. Just look at Hawthorn, who remain on track for their fourth straight premiership. Mitchell and fellow 300-gamer Shaun Burgoyne, along with Luke Hodge and Josh Gibson, are all well into their 30s, while Jordan Lewis is also in his fourth decade. Indeed the strong form of the old guard is causing the Hawks the odd headache, with the prospect very much alive that all of their senior brigade will keep going in 2017, and take up considerable salary cap space.

Madden says it is no coincidence that there is generally a strong correlation between the age ladder and the one that actually counts, with Geelong (Corey Enright), Sydney (Jude Bolton and Adam Goodes) and Fremantle (Matthew Pavlich), all reaping in recent years the rewards of keeping players going for longer than they once might have. "You can't replace that experience easily. And because these days there's an enormous amount of intellectual property within each experienced player, like any organisation you don't want to lose too much of that overnight.

"The hardest part of an AFL player's career is the first 50 to 80 games. If you don't get yourself established, it's 'thanks very much for coming'.

"So if you can get beyond the 100 games you've probably learnt a lot, and you probably can play."

Not that it's an entirely risk-free strategy. As North Melbourne have found over the past six weeks, it's all well and good to have older, injury-prone players such as Daniel Wells and Jarrad Waite firing in April, but keeping them on the park in June and July can be a tougher proposition.

Still, the Roos don't have to look far for inspiration, as they prepare to celebrate Brent Harvey breaking Michael Tuck's games record.

Some commentators have suggested over the past decade that the game is too intense and fast for Tuck's tally to be bettered, but given that the list of 400 game players doubled last year as Harvey and Dustin Fletcher both reached the nigh-on-impossible mark, perhaps we should be resetting our gauges?

Madden won't be surprised if Tuck, Harvey, Fletcher and Kevin Bartlett have to find a bit more room for their reunions. "I think there's a chance we could bump up the number of 400-game players on the basis that it's in the club's interests to manage these players, and it's in the players' interests to hang in there for as long as they can."

And when you consider the form this year of Burgoyne, Thompson, Mitchell, Enright and Nick Riewoldt, who would bet against it happening?