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Zak Butters ran on to the Adelaide Oval like he always does: over-caffeinated eyes darting, that Ramsay Bolton face of his beaming. But there was an extra edge to this one. It would almost certainly be his last ever Showdown, and he was determined to make it a memorable one. Two and half hours later, he’d played one of the best games of his career, turned Adelaide inside-out and showed why he is the most sought-after footballer in the country.

From the moment he stood up to Max Gawn in his first AFL game, Butters has bowed to no one. “A competitive little prick,” Ken Hinkley once called him – presumably as a term of endearment – and the 23 Crows players who gave him an unfathomably wide berth would no doubt agree.

There were two areas where Port demolished Adelaide – at stoppages and whenever the ball hit the deck – and Butters excelled in both scenarios. He had such a good rapport with his lantern-jawed, much-improved ruckman Jordon Sweet, sharking his taps at full pelt. As always, there was an urgency and hyperactivity to his game as he scampered around the ground – slicing, zigging, zagging and mouthing off. But whenever the moment called for it, he demonstrated great poise, checking and weighing his kicks to housemate Mitch Georgiades.

Butters grew up a mad Western Bulldogs supporter, and idolised Marcus Bontempelli. Luke Beveridge was presumably beside himself watching Showdown 60, though pretty much all the Victorian clubs are desperate for his signature. The system is such that players in his position really can’t say anything about where they’re going to be playing next year. Anything they do say has to be a white lie of sorts, or yet another deflection. It makes for a rolling feed of half-arsed speculation, and little else.

Butters has played the charade. But he could just as easily have phoned it in this year. He could have gone through the motions, collected his 20 or 25 touches a week, left on relatively good terms, and done little to hurt his asking price. When the team kept losing, albeit in desperately unlucky circumstances a number of times, he could have turned up his toes. Instead, he’s been an outstanding contributor.

No one would begrudge him heading home, but it’s a shame we won’t get to see his partnership with Jason Horne-Francis reach full maturation. The pair terrorised the passive Crows, bowling them over and running them off their feet. They had 66 possessions and 23 clearances between them. Butters said it was one of the best wins of his career, up there with the finals and Hinkley’s last game, and it was surely one of the best games he’s ever played.

Port’s prison bar jumper was a nod to the club’s peerless 1914 team, which went through the season undefeated and won the grand final by 15 goals. Three members of that team were killed on the western front. And the modern Port had clearly been ginned up for the contest, bringing a level of intensity that harked back to some of those great Hinkley inspired ambushes. After being asleep at the post against North Melbourne in round one, Port have played some terrific football this year, but just haven’t been able to catch a break in close finishes. Their attack on the ball and their gang tackling rattled the Crows.

Adelaide had no room or time, and despite being run ragged by Butters and Horne-Francis, they seemed to have no inclination to clamp down on either of them. There’s enough evidence now that if the opposition bring the heat, if the Crows clearance game is amiss and if Jordan Dawson is anything less than magnificent, the Crows will wilt.

In the final game of the round, Fremantle went two games clear of the rest of the competition by walloping a wretched Gold Coast side. If the home and away season ended today, they’d be five games clear of whoever they play in the qualifying final. Their 14 wins have been so different – from jolly romps, to rollicking comebacks to hand-to-hand combat.

The Gold Coast team they met on Sunday were a far cry from the side that rolled into Perth like hired assassins last September. The Suns left Perth after that elimination final on a chartered flight and were served drinks by an airline crew staff that sported the club’s “All Gas, No Brakes” finals-themed shirts. They spend most of their energy these days flailing their arms at the umpires and at one another.

The wind is at Fremantle’s back now. The fact that they don’t have a single player missing through injury is testament to superb conditioning. But there’s also a lot of luck involved, and luck isn’t something the Dockers have had in abundance in their 30-year history. They’ve only used 30 players in 2026. If they make a preliminary or a grand final, squeezing out half a dozen players is going to one of the hardest things Justin Longmuir has ever done.