Australians love to refer to rugby league as "the game".
Watch The Footy Show and you hear Phil Gould and Wendell Sailor and Fatty Vautin saying "the game has been affected" or "the game is stronger than ever".
The game has just been kicked in the teeth.
Here's why this is such a shocking story: sport is about excellence. It is about the standards set by teams like the Crusaders, the Los Angeles Lakers and Manchester United, and by people like Roger Federer, Michael Schumacher and Usain Bolt.
But it is also about striving for excellence, and about the glory of doing so without resorting to drugs, unsporting behaviour or fiddled books.
When "the game" was crumbling under the weight of sex scandals, the Melbourne Storm's on-field brilliance stood for all that was great about rugby league, but in the space of a few hours on Thursday, five years of systematic cheating tossed all that out of the window.
"The game" has been abused by those who played it best.
Now the questions start to spew out. How could this have happened? Was everyone at the club so giddy with success they didn't notice the men in the front office running two sets of accounts? How did the NRL not uncover the rort before now?
It always seemed a little strange that Melbourne was able to hold on to its stars, especially when the likes of Greg Inglis and Billy Slater and Cameron Smith got to the stage where they could be ranked among the 10 best players in the NRL.
Now we know the Storm had cunning, if surprisingly simple, plans in place to hold on to its marquee names by paying them more, secretly.
But why? Was it an ego trip? Is winning really that important?
Many have rushed to defend the players, arguing they can't possibly have known the extent of the cheating going on at management level.
Really? I haven't played much top-level rugby league but I know what young men are like when they hang out in dressing rooms and bars. They talk. They compare cars, girlfriends and pay packets.
League players might not be mathematicians but it seems unlikely Slater, Inglis and others did not occasionally look around them and wonder how one club could afford to stockpile so much talent.
From the neutral sports fan's perspective, that is what makes this situation sad as well as shocking. The talent in this Storm side is extraordinary. Inglis is the sport's Superman, Slater its Michael Jordan, Smith its Sean Fitzpatrick, coach Craig Bellamy its Vince Lombardi.
There's now a $300 million stadium waiting for a team that is reviled and may take years to be cleansed of this salary cap stain, and there's now more spotlight than ever on this strange situation where media giant News Limited owns the Melbourne Storm and is a 50% owner of the NRL.
The Storm has always been a stranger in a strange land, of course. Melbourne is Australian Rules territory, where the shorts are short and the stadiums are oval. The Storm rode into town on the back of News Limited money at the end of the Super League war. Success was instant, but look at the cost.
Other clubs - including the Bulldogs (37) and the Warriors (4) - have been docked points for salary-cap breaches, but nothing in league compares with the punishment handed to the Storm, which has been stripped of two titles and will not be allowed to accrue any more points this year.
That is a mind-boggling price to pay, even for a crime of such magnitude. The only comparable sentence in world sport is Italian football's decision to strip two titles from powerhouse club Juventus, which was also forcibly relegated from Serie B, in the "Calciopoli" scandal in 2006. That was match-fixing, arguably a much more serious sporting crime than exceeding a salary cap.
The rest of the season is dead for Melbourne, and the players are in a lose-lose situation. If they win a game, they earn no points and it will be felt they have won only through cheating. If they lose, they lose.
Motivation, for the players, will be limited to playing well enough to impress other clubs, who will inevitably be sniffing around for bargains in the Storm fire sale.
The future for the Storm is grim enough but this saga could also lead to scrutiny of other clubs and their accounts.
Perhaps the Eels and the Cowboys and the Dragons and the Broncos and the other leading clubs are squeaky clean. But perhaps they are not. And imagine what a second 2010 salary-cap scandal coming soon after the first would do to "the game".
No doubt, we will soon hear the argument that the salary cap is too strict, or that it isn't working at all for rugby league.
Formula 1 floated the concept of a salary cap last year and the mega-rich teams immediately ensured it wouldn't happen. English football, or at least the fans of the major clubs that completely dominate, doesn't want wage bills to be capped. Player unions hate the idea of restricting earnings.
But salary caps have worked in other sports. They keep costs down and they ensure parity across the competition.
Rugby league (eight different NRL champions in the past decade), basketball (five NBA champions in six years) and American football (six Super Bowl champions in eight years) are shining examples of how salary caps can do good for a sport. Ice hockey (four NHL champions in four years) introduced a cap following a player lock-out in 2004-05.
American sports have used luxury taxes - generally a fine to match the amount by which the cap has been breached - to enforce salary caps.
New Zealand rugby belatedly introduced a salary cap in 2006 but set it far too high ($2 million) and clouded it with issues such as "notional values", which recognised payments made to Super 14 players by the NZRU. The cap has now been reduced, to the lesser of $1.35 million or 36% of a province's commercial revenue, with notional values removed.
Critics might suggest salary caps should be introduced at Super 14 level - the Crusaders might be considered the Storm in disguise - but the NZRU would not want to dilute the strength of its power franchises.
Australian rugby, of course, is taking a huge interest in the Storm's downfall, with the expansion Melbourne Rebels franchise wasting no time in getting rid of its new chief, Brian Waldron, the so-called architect of the Storm rort.
There could be an ironic benefit for rugby from the scandal: The Australian rugby writer Wayne Smith has pointed out there might be a few ex-league players looking for jobs in Melbourne next year.
So that's it. The Melbourne Storm's extraordinary record has been expunged. But "the game" may take much longer to recover.
MELBOURNE STORM
- Scandal of the century
> BREACHED the salary cap by NZ$2.2 million
> STRIPPED of two NRL titles and three minor premierships
> FORFEITED all eight points earned this season
> WILL NOT be awarded any further points in 2010
> FINED NZ$650,000
> ORDERED to repay NZ$1.4 million in prizemoney
SALARY CAPS
- The numbers
> NFL (American football): $179.8 million (but no cap next year)
> NBA (basketball): $81.1 million
> NHL (ice hockey): $79.8 million
> Guinness Premiership (English rugby): $8.6 million
> A-League (football): $3 million
> ITM Cup (rugby): $1.35 million
> NBL (Australian basketball): $1.3 million
> ANZ Championship (netball): $300,000
> No salary cap: Super 14, Formula 1, English football, Major League Baseball.
• All firgure in NZ dollars
