KEY POINTS:
Sometimes in a rapidly-changing world, it's no a bad thing to contemplate the old days.
Remember what life was like before cellphones? Brilliant.
A friend reckons the worst thing about having a cellphone is when it rings there's a fair chance someone he doesn't want to talk to is on the other end. That thought occurred as the spat rumbled on over Tasman and Northland's right to be in the Air New Zealand Cup.
Should it be 14 teams, offering a nice geographical spread from far South to the top of the North, or 12, with an accompanying lift in playing standards, or even 10 teams? Let's get ruthless. Even better.
For the past three years, the cup has lurched about with repechages, modified - that is incomplete - round robins and teams not playing each other at all in a season. So take your mind back to 2005 and the final year of three divisions. It was all so simple.
The third division was a beaut. Teams who knew that was their lot, looked forward to annual contests against teams broadly of similar standard. Local derbies - Poverty Bay vs East Coast; Buller vs West Coast - added spice and the after-match get-togethers were invariably pretty tasty too.
In its past six years, it produced six different champions, and that alone makes a compelling argument of its worth as a competition.
The second division was something of a problem child, the champions rarely able to topple the bottom first division team in a playoff, but at least it had promotion-relegation - a must if you want some zip into the latter stages of the campaign.
And as for the first division, even if Auckland and Canterbury dominated the honours board, it was a genuine contest, in which everyone played everyone else.
How can a competition be called a level playing field if teams don't all play each other? It's nonsense. Auckland, for example, didn't play Otago, Tasman and Hawkes Bay in the round robin. Teams might well argue they've missed out on a couple of highly winnable games, which would alter the points table.
Imagine if Chelsea only had to play Arsenal, Liverpool and Aston Villa once a season, while Manchester United missed a second opportunity to maul Stoke City, Newcastle United and West Bromwich Albion? Sir Alex Ferguson might have a thought on that.
And suggesting there's insufficient time is hogwash. Start a couple of weeks earlier. But then the All Blacks will still be playing and therefore unavailable, I hear you say. So what's new? Jerome Kaino plays his first game for Auckland tomorrow. All Blacks are pulled around at the whim of the national selectors and the players' collective on rest periods.
Provincial coaches are reduced to Uriah Heep-like characters, hand-wringing, forelock-tugging figures wishing they had their hotshots available for a key game - and the hotshots want to play too - only to be told, "tough, they're recuperating from being on the bench in a test two weeks ago".
Perhaps there are good practical reasons for that, but it's a desperately hard sell. Right now, the cup is a turnoff.
