I'll never forget the moments before the 2016 NRL grand final between the Melbourne Storm and Cronulla, which felt more like a title fight than a footy match. I remember the roar in the 2013 AFL finals series when Richmond made its first appearance in 12 years, and how the players later spoke of being able to feel the ground shake. We wanted to rip Carlton's heads off that day. It was much the same four years later when Richmond beat Greater Western Sydney to make its first grand final for 35 years.

And then there's European football. What struck me most last year when I went to see Paris Saint-Germain host Liverpool in the Champions League was the implicit violence in the air. Perhaps it was in my head, planted there by reputation and the ring of police officers I had to pass on my way into the ground. But I'll never forget the way the crowd howled at every half-incident with a desperation that hovered constantly around tipping point. It was deafening. It was intimidating. And it was awesome.

It's a paradox. Personally, I don't like any of the ingredients I've listed that go into making these crowds. I'm not that kind of barracker. But I also know that if everyone was like me, sport would be dead. Truth is I owe some of my most precious experiences to people who behave in ways I'd never want to condone. And it's just about impossible to have those transcendent moments without the things that spill out of it: rancid language, torrents of abuse, occasional crowd violence. It's these things that lurk behind the euphemism of "passion".

As best I can tell, there's no clean way to resolve this. Thus did the AFL run into the full force of that paradox this week. Clearly, in a response to a series of crowd fights this season, and supporter feedback that some people felt uncomfortable bringing their children to games, the AFL has tried to improve its crowd security in ways that aren't completely transparent.

Equally clearly, a good portion of supporters feels overly policed and intimidated into silence by an increasingly visible and proactive security presence. The AFL is discovering just how difficult it is to clean up a sporting event without sanitising it. And footy supporters are learning what it is to feel criminalised and surveilled because a tiny minority have done some terrible things. Understandable, then, that while there is frequent acknowledgement that crowd behaviour is a problem, there's also much sympathy for the fans caught up in this.

Except, isn't this exactly what soccer fans have been complaining about for years? Is there a more policed fan base in the country? And hasn't that been broadly justified in media commentary as a matter of soccer's exceptionalism as the only sport with a crowd violence problem? Yes, soccer crowds have their depredations. But the extent of their uniqueness, especially in Australia, has always been exaggerated.

It's a myth designed to achieve two things. First, to present soccer violence as somehow inherent to the "foreign" cultures that support the game. Second, to exonerate the crowds of more quintessentially Australian sports whose violence and misbehaviour becomes scrubbed clean in the public imagination. They have hooligans. We have larrikins. They should be surrounded by mounted police. We should be observed lightly and treated like adults. In this way we overlook the dark side of all great sporting events, and instead recast this as a foreign problem. Jeff Kennett may have been widely condemned this week for suggesting the AFL's overpolicing of crowds came from security guards who don't understand our game because they are likely "new arrivals". But his comments reflect an established tradition in our discourse: to hold real Australian crowds innocent of the dark side of all great sporting events.

That myth is no longer sustainable in quite the same way. And now the media coverage strikes a starkly different tone. Far from an emphasis on AFL hooligans, it seems to have unearthed a new protagonist: the persecuted fan whose run-ins with officialdom somehow make their abusive invective heroic. Witness how some quarters of the media are celebrating the fan ejected after calling an umpire a "bald-headed flog". This glosses over the real allegation: that the fan in question was directly, physically intimidating a specific umpire. But it works as a trope because the fan comes to stand in as a symbolic "us" in exactly the same way the soccer fan is a symbolic "them".

It's a problem because it risks wishing away the inherent paradox of sport. That can lead only to one side prevailing over the other: a sterile sporting environment or an unhinged one. If we're going to have a healthy sporting culture we'll need to recognise that it can never be perfected. We'll need to acknowledge that the paradox is real. We can't seek to ignore it by burying it beneath competing cultural caricatures.