Greg Baum is chief sports columnist and associate editor with The Age
Another bastion of male exclusivity has fallen. On Tuesday, the Carbine Club voted to break with 55 years of tradition to admit two women. They are Peggy O'Neal, the president of Richmond football club, and Nicole Livingstone, an Olympic silver medalist in swimming and now a media figure.
Now that James Brayshaw has hung up his two most prominent caps, at Channel 9 and as chairman of North Melbourne, he admits that having several of them jammed on his head at once took a toll that he hopes he can remediate.
Andrew Bogut is a formidable basketballer, who played a manful role in Australia's gallant tilt at the windmills in Rio. He is also, more than most sportspeople, socially engaged. I could say, quirkily, doubtfully, provocatively engaged, but he would say the same of my world view.
It is the emails that should be sounding an alarm. A whole tranche of them. No, make that a trove; Wikileaks would. They've been flooding in for weeks. Names. Numbers. Names linked to numbers, like a code.
The Bulldog grand final balm will be at work on Friday night when key people from the three different - and not always amicable - administrations since the club was declared clinically dead in 1989 gather at the home of president Peter Gordon to rejoice together.
At Spotless Stadium on Saturday night, the Bulldogs might have set a record for non-grand final tears.
The Bulldogs beat the house. They beat the odds. They beat the system. They beat the Giants, these Davids. And they're in the grand final for the first time in 55 years.
All good things must come to an end. Sometime during the third quarter of this semi-final, the last straw alighted on Hawthorn's back, so broad for so long, and broke it.
For two months, North Melbourne were clinging on. For two more hours at the Adelaide Oval, they clung some more. But like a man with his fingernails dug into the ledge of a cliff, they had to let go eventually.
It's September. It's finals. It's that archetypal new season, on elevated terms, before heaving crowds. It's Hawthorn time. It's Geelong time. It's time for Geelong-Hawthorn. If ever there were two teams to awaken one another to their vocations, it is these two.
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