I'm sorry, but is there really anything that special about the 2010 rugby league season?

With three days left until the first synthetic inflatable is booted skywards, you'd be forgiven for thinking the second coming of Christ was about to be shown on Channel Nine (back to back with the third coming, with breaks for ads).

Rugby league has been played every winter for 102 years in Sydney and yet every March we blindly lap up the exhortations of officials, coaches and players who tell us that their teams are "fitter than ever''.

Professional sport is just cheap, extremely well-rating, reality TV to occupy the idle masses, right? It ceased to have anything really relevant to impart when it became a commercial commodity years ago, right?

Well actually, in the case of the National Rugby League in 2010, wrong. No.

This is an intriguing and genuinely significant season in a number of ways that have nothing to do with ruck speed, second-man plays, the salary cap or Brazilian jujitsu manoeuvres.

This is the year a sporting league is expected to end 10 years of recovery from a life-threatening corporate take-over attempt, with News Limited ending its co-ownership of the NRL in favour of an independent commission.

In a significant re-alignment of rugby league's relationship with its parent code, Lote Tuqiri is returning to the fold while Sonny Bill Williams and Mark Gasnier consider doing likewise.

It's the winter when the cultural fabric of one Australian city (Melbourne) attempts to envelop another (Sydney) in the form of its football code, testing once and for all whether the latter has a sense of community and history strong enough to withstand the incursion.

And it's a season when the glamorous private owners who helped resurrect a deeply tribal club, South Sydney, arrive at a point where they have a team to recapture the past - and point the way forward for how all teams will be run in the future.

No, this is no garden variety winter. In fact, all indications are that the game's historians will look back on the coming seven months as a crossroads, a watershed.

Whether that be good or bad, we are about to find out.

With AFL on the doorstep, Parramatta, Penrith, Wests Tigers and the Bulldogs are all in need of good seasons and all seem bound to have them.

Newly-crowed world champions Melbourne move into their new stadium and hopefully deepen their outpost's foundations.

On paper, the Warriors faced a difficult time just a year and a half after the Kiwis' tumultuous World Cup victory.

The jockeying has already begun in the television rights battle. A new committee to oversee the way clubs handle off-field misbehaviour will be tested as officials desperately bid to clean up players' battered image in the eyes of parents.

And the sport's greatest individual since Andrew Johns, Jarryd Hayne, attempts to take his on-field feats to mythic proportions as he wrestles with his role as an off-field spokesman.

The plotlines are many, the stakes are high. Nineteenth-century German journalist Heinrich Heine once wrote: ''To stand at the crossroads requires more strength than you possess.'' But, apparently, he was not a financial member of the Rugby League Writers Association.

AND FINALLY,  STEVE MASCORD GETS OUT HIS CRYSTAL BALL AND FORESEES .....

GRAND FINALISTS: Parramatta and Melbourne

PREMIERS: Parramatta

PLAYER OF THE YEAR: Greg Inglis

MOST TRIES: Nathan Merritt

MOST POINTS: Johnathan Thurston

SET TO SURPRISE: Terry Campese - back to his best for the Raiders after a quiet-ish 2009.

SET TO DISAPPOINT: Manly. Matt Orford will be sorely, sorely missed.

FIVE RANDOM PREDICTIONS:

1. NSW to finally win an Origin series.
2. Cronulla to teeter close to the brink.
3. Todd Carney to fall off the wagon- again.
4. The independent commission to do nothing special at first.
5. More and more switching of venues to suit the occasion.