Those of you heading to the NAB Cup decider on Saturday night want to take a little keepsake with them home from the game.

It could be the AFL Record, perhaps your ticket stub. At the very least take a photo to prove you were there.

That's because there is every chance that the Saints-Bulldogs clash could be the final ever pre-season grand final. At most, the second last.

The pre-season competition is doomed once the next stage of AFL expansion is complete.

With a bye in place next season to accommodate Gold Coast, the home and away season needs to start a week earlier. And with 17 teams, the pre-season competition will need a fundamental change from a straight knock-out competition.

Once we get to 18 teams in 2012, the NAB Cup becomes a logistical nightmare, which means the AFL and the smarter clubs are looking long-term towards what might happen once there is no longer a pre-season competition.

Within the next two years, two more rounds of home and away matches seems a given and this would certainly please the broadcasters, who so far count the NAB Cup as part of their entitlements each year. A mid-March start on the same weekend as the NRL would suit the AFL, particularly once the new teams go head-to-head with the neighboring rugby league teams.

But for the clubs, the issue is match fitness and match conditioning. Watch NAB Challenge matches and you'll see football being played at about 30 per cent of the intensity of a home and away match.

The entire pre-season - NAB Cup and NAB Challenge - is an exercise in getting 'minutes' into players. Some coming off injuries need plenty. So do the kids. Others, who will be missing the start of the season because of suspension, also get a fair work out. Carlton skipper Chris Judd will miss the first three matches of the season because of suspension, so has therefore played every match of Carlton's pre-season. The same at Hawthorn, where Lance Franklin is out for round one, so he too has played all four matches to date.

Do you really think either of those two players who have played every week so far if they were available for round one?

The likely approach from the AFL is to stage two weeks of inter-club/NAB Challenge matches in the lead-up to the season, in order to get these 'minutes' into players. Expect a fair percentage of these to be played in developing markets so that the likes of Alice Springs, Canberra, North Queensland and the major regional centres of Victoria, New South Wales and South Australia still get their AFL fix in the flesh.

It might mean that by round one, players are a bit more underdone than they might have been in previous seasons. But all teams will be in the same boat.

But with the players having been out of sight for five months, the anticipation and appetite ahead of round one will be enormous. With no depressing NAB Cup defeats to dampen enthusiasm, the new season would start with a bang for all 18 teams.

So our message to the Bulldogs and the Saints is to savour the win on Saturday night. It might well be history-making.