It’s all a bit fuzzy now but it was a Saturday morning in 1970-something and the location was the Christian Brothers College footy oval in the east park lands.

Our brave CBC team was engaged in a desperate contest against a rival team from a college for rich kids on the other side of town.

Inexplicably, I’d been overlooked yet again to take the field in ruck, or full forward, or the back pocket. Or anywhere else.

Instead, I had the dual role of boundary umpire and time-keeper.

With just minutes left in the final quarter, we were ahead by just a few points. But the footy was heading ominously toward the opposition’s big white sticks.

Glancing quickly at the stopwatch, I calculated the time was up and joyously blew my whistle to signal game over.

We’d won by the barest of margins.

Victory against the old foe.

How sweet it was.

Back in the changerooms, I was the man of the moment.

That’s until our coach, Brother Drake, appeared in the doorframe, whistle swinging from his neck, his face pinched white with rage, steam issuing from under his dog collar.

“Abraham,” he said. “If murder was legal, I’d kill you.”

The game, it seems, still had several minutes to run when I’d blown the whistle. Maths was never my strong suit.

While the result was not overturned, our school had been seen to have stolen a win.

Brother Drake’s fury over an innocent mistake seems a strange twist on St Augustine’s letter teaching “with love for mankind and hatred of sins”, more commonly translated as “love the sinner but hate the sin”.

You all know where this is heading, don’t you?

This whole exercise is a case study in the futility of organisations getting suckered into fighting an imaginary foe on an empty battlefield.

Last Saturday, the Mighty Adelaide Crows were “robbed” of victory against the Sydney Swans and a last-gasp chance to play in the AFL finals round.

With just over a minute left on the clock, and the Crows trailing by two points, Ben Keays booted what looked to be a match-winning goal from a free kick on the boundary. The goal umpire ruled it had hit the post. Sydney won by just one point.

If the AFL had an outrage meter installed at Adelaide Oval, it surely would have exploded into a thousand shards of self-pity.

Countless TV slow-mo replays appear to show the goal umpire got it wrong, although from my admittedly casual squiz at the vision it is possible the ball may have smudged the goal post’s protective padding by a whisker. Isn’t it?

On Sunday, retiring AFL boss Gillon McLachlan, the three million dollar man, his arm in a sling after falling from his polo pony – you can’t make this stuff up – admitted that the goal umpire had made a mistake. McLachlan apologised for the error, in that Gillon kind of way.

The goal umpire was stood down and is probably in witness protection with a new identity in a safe house some distance north of Gluepot.

Crows coach Matthew Nicks shrugged his shoulders and said the team lost the game in the first and second quarters, not the last minute. He’s a smart guy.

That should have been the end of it. But this is South Australia and nobody does “we wuz robbed” better than us. After wheat, barley and wine, it’s our biggest export industry.

The Crows army went bunta, the fires of outrage stoked by the club, former players, otherwise known as “sporting identities”, and a Crows-obsessed media.

If Adelaide was Paris, they’d be boarding up the shop fronts, only Adelaide has so many boarded-up shopfronts nobody would notice.

A seething Crows chairman, former Liberal Premier John Olsen, declared the Crows would seek “redress” over what he described as an injustice and a “costly decision to the Adelaide Football Club both on and off the field”.

The Advertiser reported Olsen hoped for “some recognition and redress” which could include a “suite of options” such as compensation for interstate travel costs or fairer scheduling of games at the MCG.

The sum of $300,000 was bandied about as the impact of missing a finals berth.

This whole exercise is a case study in the futility of organisations getting suckered into fighting an imaginary foe on an empty battlefield.

It’s not just a trap for footy clubs. Political parties fall into it, too.

Former Labor Prime Minister Paul Keating liked to say: “The dogs may bark, but the caravan moves on, my friend”.

The South Australian Liberal Party wasted years in Opposition barking mad about the elections they lost despite winning more than 50 per cent of the two-party preferred vote.

John Olsen should know.

As Liberal leader, he lost both the 1985 and 1989 state elections, despite the Liberals achieving a five-seat swing and 52 pc of the 2PP-vote in 1989.

The perceived injustice of this tied the party in knots for decades. It was a world-record sulk.

But just imagine if voters were able to seek “redress” over injustices that have cost them dearly.

Olsen said he wouldn’t privatise ETSA – the state-owned and much-loved Electricity Trust of SA – and in government set about doing just that.

The unpopular privatisation left the state with some of the most expensive power prices in the world.

Should householders demand “redress” in the form of refunds on their electricity bills?

Former Premier and Crows chair John Olsen (left) with the man he ousted as Premier, Dean Brown, at the swearing-in of the Marshall ministry in 2018. Photo: Tony Lewis/InDaily

In his second coming to state politics, Olsen rolled sitting Liberal Premier Dean Brown in November 1996, despite the fact Brown had led the Liberals to a landslide victory barely two years earlier.

It ramped up an internecine Liberal feud that crippled the party for years.

Olsen never apologised to Brown nor admitted it was an error. Nor should he. It’s called politics and it’s a dirty game.

But do Liberal voters deserve “redress” for all those wasted years?

Olsen was effectively forced to resign as Premier in October 2001 when he was found to have misled parliament over his role in wooing Motorola to SA.

He didn’t apologise, had done nothing illegal and probably didn’t need to quit.

Years later he stated that “the standard I applied to myself at the time seems to have disappeared from modern politics”.

Rather than letting it cripple him, John Olsen went on to have a rewarding, and well-rewarded, career as a diplomat, Liberal mover-and-shaker and, of course, as Crows chairman.

In 2014, Steven Marshall won 53 pc of the vote but still managed to lose to Labor’s Jay Weatherill, who held government with an embarrassing 47 pc.

After the election, over a coffee with the re-elected Premier Weatherill, I challenged him on the unfairness of the boundaries that delivered Labor victory with such a low share of the popular vote.

“And if my Aunty had balls, she’d be my Uncle,” he replied, smiling.

Next Wednesday, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese will lob in Adelaide to finally unveil the date for the referendum on the indigenous voice to parliament, now widely tipped to be October 14.

He has sold it as a vote that will unite the nation, but with an increasingly rancorous debate swirling down the plughole, it will do anything but unite us.

On current opinion polling, the best-case scenario is for a tight result, with the nation split almost 50-50 between the Yes and No camps.

The PM and Opposition Leader Peter Dutton will need to manage a divided outcome and narrow result so that we do not spend decades wallowing in a swamp filled with what-ifs.

As for the Crows, time to hitch up the Jayco and move on. They say Gluepot is nice at this time of the year.

Matthew Abraham is InDaily’s political columnist. Matthew can be found on Twitter as @kevcorduroy. It’s a long story.