Almost since the ACT Brumbies were born, Australian rugby powerbrokers have speculated - especially in earshot of Sydney journalists - the Brumbies were wasted on Canberra when there was supposedly more money to be made in Perth or Melbourne.

As far back as 1998, interstate papers were saying the Brumbies could be moved to a bigger capital to allow expansion to four Australian teams. The Brumbies coach at the time was Eddie Jones. Outraged, he said the team was a Canberra operation performing for Canberrans and relocation was "not an option".

Fast forward almost 20 years and Stephen Larkham made much the same point last week when talk of a Melbourne Rebels/Brumbies merger sprang as we await the seemingly inevitable axing of one of the Aussie Super Rugby teams.

For Force and Rebels fans, this sense of fear for the future is fairly new. But it's all too familiar to supporters of a team that's been one of the best things to ever happen to Australian rugby. We're used to having our city and team kicked around like a Gilbert.

Among heavyhitters who've in the past openly said Canberra mightn't deserve the Brumbies are former ARU chief John O'Neill and former Wallabies coach Bob Dwyer, who said in 2004 - a Brumbies' title-winning year no less - "it would be very disappointing for their supporters...but are the Brumbies best-placed in Canberra?".

Never mind the fact that Canberra is the only city of the three under the current cloud to which the AFL doesn't own the keys. And with Canberra on its way to a 500,000 population by the time some of the club's now under-20s are hanging up their boots, rugby should be grimly defending what is a bigger slice of the pie here than is possible practically anywhere else in the country.

Still, the Australian Rugby Union and SANZAAR's capacity for self-harm should never be underestimated. And so the most successful Australian team of the professional era has to wait and hope.

If we can assume though the people charged with this decision aren't complete idiots, the Brumbies should survive. If they weren't sacrificed to expansion, then they shouldn't be to competition contraction.

So then what?

The first thing they should do is try to protect the club from future rumours of relocation or mergers, because believe me, they will come. The only reason we haven't heard incessant talk of the Brumbies being uprooted somewhere these past few years is because Perth and Melbourne both finally got what they wanted.

Literally every year since '98 that either Perth or Melbourne didn't have a team there were reports of the Brumbies being sized up for the removalist truck to one or the other.

So how about we make it harder for this kind of talk to gain traction in the future, especially if the Brumbies are safe and either the west or the south goes back to being a rugby backwater?

There's some big-picture stuff that would help, like rugby in Australia somehow creating the general interest that moves turnstiles, which it hasn't really done since the mid-noughties.

Or the ACT government actually achieving some of the vision bit of 'City to the Lake' by building a stadium that appeals to more than just the die-hards. But these are big, and potentially impossible dreams.

The focus of the Brumbies' administration after any SANZAAR decision that spares them should be to reinforce to their home city who they are and who they always have been.

They're made one solid step this year, returning to a fairly traditional jersey design; a good symbolic move after a year of off-field chaos.

But the easiest win would be immediately restoring the ACT to the club's name.

During his tenure former Brumbies chief executive and marketing guru Rob Clarke was passionate about keeping the Brumbies in Canberra. He shot down Bob Dwyer's relocation comments in 2004 as "stupid" and said the team would move cities over his dead body.

But even as he was passionately defending the Brumbies as Canberra's forever, the club was ditching the local identifier in a bid to make it more appealing to people elsewhere. It was about selling a team to potential supporters who, he claimed, didn't understand what "Act Rugby" was. Brumbies Rugby was much more than a team, he said.

"There are opportunities to take our brand into other product lines and categories that may be sports-related but not necessarily rugby-related," Clarke told the Australian Financial Review at the time.

Ironically, it was precisely this approach of branding over tribalism that Eddie Jones had warned against a few years earlier when the South African teams had done the same thing.

Jones felt just having animal monikers for teams from places relatively few of us have ever been was hurting crowds at Canberra Stadium, which was in turn inviting speculation about the Brumbies' viability.

I suspect that's why the Brumbies themselves have softened what were always fairly mild objections to media attaching geographic tags to teams. They know it does more good than harm.

Whatever merit the attempt to define "Brumbies Rugby" as a global brand had in 2004 when they were star-studded competition winners, this vainglorious exercise long ago ran its course.

When so many outsiders would love to pick the Brumbies up and plonk them somewhere else, or destroy them entirely, why project borderlessness and portability? Surely not to please supporters in Wagga Wagga or Batemans Bay.

Simply put, this is a a great club that always has and, if good sense prevails, always will belong first and foremost to the ACT. Be proud of it.

John-Paul Moloney is group managing editor for the ACT & Southern Inland and a former rugby reporter for The Canberra Times.