This concludes the Otago Daily Times series, State of the Union, assessing the health of New Zealand rugby. Rugby writer Hayden Meikle sums up the issues and wonders what might lie ahead for our national game.
Seven years ago, our newspaper ran a series entitled Rugby In Crisis and concluded the sport had some serious problems.
It would be nice to report all that ails our national game has been neatly solved in the time that has elapsed since then, but that would simply not be true.
Rugby, and New Zealand rugby in particular, faces a grim future if it continues to struggle with the issues that are damaging the foundations, and the perception, of the sport that has been such a big part of this country for over a century.
The issues have been well documented.
Crowds are down, television ratings are down, clubs are struggling, the All Blacks can't win the tournament that matters most, the provincial unions are bleeding money, and the trickle of top players to more lucrative overseas teams has become a torrent.
But what we wanted to achieve in this series was not to simply bunker down and say rugby is stuffed. There is too much bemoaning of the sport's problems and not enough constructive suggestions for its future.
Since becoming rugby writer in late 2004, I've had to wrestle with three major questions:
Is rugby now just another sport?
Has it lost its soul?
Or has it simply made the inevitable transition from sport to business since going professional 12 years ago, and suffered the consequences?
There is no doubt there are plenty of people disillusioned with rugby, whether it be the casual fan who feels there is too much on television, the club official annoyed with the New Zealand Rugby Union, or the former player aghast at the rotation of players at All Black level.
On the flip side, my 8-year-old stepson came home buzzing from school last week after a visit from Highlanders forwards Jason Macdonald and Hoani MacDonald, and went to his first game at Carisbrook a day later. Loved it.
A good starting point for considering the future of rugby is accepting there is too much of it, and it is interesting to note even NZRU chief executive Steve Tew agrees.
The issue is not necessarily how many games there are but the length of time over which they are spread. Not many sports ask their fans to sustain their interest from early February until late November. It's an insane situation and eventually someone will have to solve it.
Has the Super 14 done its dash? I think so, at least in its current form.
Perhaps it wouldn't be a bad thing if the competition brought in new teams, perhaps from the Pacific Islands, Argentina and the United States, and went to some sort of two-division system.
Has test rugby lost some of its value? Without question. I don't want to see the All Blacks playing in Hong Kong or churning through endless games against the Springboks and Wallabies.
Can a national championship involving 14 professional teams be sustained? Highly doubtful. While I admire Hawkes Bay's efforts last year, there is too much evidence that the newlook Air New Zealand Cup is going to drive unions out of business.
The average provincial wage bill has skyrocketed to $1.3 million, and associated costs are up to an average of $714,000. I back Otago boss Richard Reid's assertion that it should be a semi-professional competition.
Money, money, money. It's a shame a sport with rugby's glorious traditions now wallows in the stuff, but it's not like we can suddenly abandon professionalism. We have to accept that New Zealand cannot match the obscene sums floating around the European game and, to borrow more of Reid's words, cut our cloth to fit.
A little less obsession with the World Cup might help. Have all the problems been magnified because the All Blacks lost in Cardiff? Would a World Cup victory paper over the cracks?
I don't believe that rugby's stuffed - yet.
It still packs thousands of people into stadiums, dominates water-cooler conversations, provides an outlet for tens of thousands of men, women, boys and girls to experience the joy of team sport, and has the elements of tradition and folklore that other sports would happily embrace.
Not to mention the fact it's still a bloody good game at its heart.
But if rugby was a patient, you'd be worried at the doctor approaching with the furrowed brow. Our game is sick, and we must act now to rescue it.