In among all this, I received an email from Nick Shaw of the Fish Creek Football and Netball Club in Gippsland. Next year their competition, the Alberton league, will go from 12 teams to seven. Shaw says Fish Creek, one of the proudest little football clubs in Australia, could be gone in three or four years.

The five departing Alberton league teams, all from bigger towns, have not gone out of existence; they have chosen to go to a new and bigger competition to be called the West Gippsland league.

Fish Creek (population  201) have been punching above their weight for decades. In the course of their 125 years, they have won 34 premierships (35 if you count the one they say was stolen from them). Notwithstanding the fact they are the reigning Alberton league premier, Fish Creek now find themselves effectively relegated to a lesser competition.

When I first drove down to watch Fish Creek play, in 1998, I was struck by the round green hills with blackwood and gum trees in their crevasses. A horse watched the game from one paddock, an emu from another. The emu had been known to get out and wander among spectators, thereby adding to the Fish Creek match-day experience.

The day before the game I met some old-timers in the Fish Creek pub who told stories and the characters they described so deftly materialised before my eyes. In the 1950s, an old tramp called Sparker used to camp in their clubrooms. They said Sparker, "was a clever bloke who wasn't the same after the war". Once, when the police picked him up, he smelt so badly they carted him through the town in the back of a utility. Sparker rose to his feet and saluted the populace of Fish Creek like a conquering general.

The next day I watched Fish Creek get up and beat the ladder leaders while the old blokes bellowed like bulls from the sidelines and the women's committee, assisted by the club president, peeled 500 potatoes in the clubrooms for the league presentation night.

The following year, Fish Creek made the grand final and I drove down again. In the main street all the shops, even the deserted ones, had red and white premiership flags in their windows. The teams for the day's games were where they had always been, on the front windows of the newsagent and the milk bar.

Fish Creek played Devon, Welshpool, Won Wron and Woodside. Otherwise known as DWWWW or the four-wheel drives, they were said to be the best team in the Alberton league for 30 years. The first time Fish Creek played the four-wheel drives that year, they managed a single point to half-time. In the second semi-final they fared even worse. Scoreless at half-time, they managed one goal for the whole match.

They lost the grand final too, but they made a game of it, even challenging in the last quarter, kicking four goals straight, before finally going down. After the final siren sounded, the DWWWW players were one riotous mass of jubilation, but it wasn't the only thing happening on the field. The Fish Creek people ghosted on to the ground – young, old, male, female. They surrounded their players, applauding them.

Fish Creek vice-president Greg Buckland says: "Footy is one of the things that holds country towns together. But, with a town as small as ours, it's the only thing that holds the town together." Because it was proposed that the Alberton league have a lower salary cap than the newly created West Gippsland league, Buckland claims players from Fish Creek's 2016 premiership team have already been approached  by neighbouring clubs offering them more money and a better standard of football. Buckland believes that Fish Creek Football and Netball Club could be forced to merge within three or four years.

John McCann, the president of Glenorchy, the Tasmanian Statewide League's reigning premier, is someone whose views on footy deserve to be better known. He talks about "the eco-system of footy". That eco-system is shrinking.  Most people would be surprised to learn that the Western Bulldogs' 2016 premiership team was captained by a Geelong Grammar old boy and largely comprised of former private schoolboys. Why?  Because private schools are the one place where the game is hanging on.

Why should you, the average AFL fan, care about any of this grass-roots footy stuff? Because not one kid from Tasmania got taken in the 2016 AFL national draft and once Tasmania bred champions.