Once upon a barely remembered time, sports venues were near where people lived. Spectators, as they were called, would walk to the game on a Saturday afternoon and the roar would fill the town.
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Over the decades, the business model has changed, a change partly driven by technology: cars meant spectators could drive to the stadium and television brought the spectacle into the home.
And Kerry Packer and Rupert Murdoch transformed the way we watch sport far more than any carrier of bat or ball did.
And now the new revolution: empty stadiums. Football in all its varieties, oval ball and round, is starting to be played with only the lenses of cameras observing - and the rest of us on our couches, not even in the pub.
As so often, Germany and South Korea are showing us the technological future.
In the Bundesliga, Borussia Monchengladbach is putting cardboard cut-outs of spectators in the stands.
More than 16,000 have been ordered. Fans pay the equivalent of $30 to have their image inserted, with the proceeds going to charity. Fans of the opposing team can have their cut-outs in the visitors' section of the ground.
In South Korea, a soccer club has been fined the equivalent of $125,000 for placing sex dolls in its stands.
I'm not suggesting the Korean way, but you can see how the new era will change the game if crowdless sport continues as long as it's likely to.
MORE DIARY OF AN OPTIMIST:
For some decades now, human beings in stadiums have seemed like extras in a TV drama, props for the cameras.
At the last Brumbies game I went to, the crowd was corralled opposite the cameras, the empty spaces out of shot. Microphones are near loud fans. On screen, the atmosphere seems more vibrant than in the ground.
So empty stadiums seems like the obvious next step.
It will change sport. Home advantage will be lost. Studies show that home fans can influence the referee to award more injury time when the home team is losing.
There are some sports which I think are better on television - cricket comes to mind. You get the detail in a sport where technique and close calls matter.
But mostly live sport should mean being there. Perhaps TV producers should now add a "crowd roar track", like comedies have a laughter track.
But I still remember the way the town where I grew up would fill with sound on a Saturday afternoon as the greatest rugby team known to man took the field.
The 15 heroes of Bridgend Rugby Football Club in Old South Wales were back on the Brewery Field, with real people shouting, standing shoulder to shoulder on the terraces.
Across town, a small boy was enchanted.
He still is.
Steve Evans
Steve Evans is a reporter on The Canberra Times. He's been a BBC correspondent in New York, London, Berlin and Seoul and the sole reporter/photographer/paper deliverer on The Glen Innes Examiner in country New South Wales. "All the jobs have been fascinating - and so it continues."
Steve Evans is a reporter on The Canberra Times. He's been a BBC correspondent in New York, London, Berlin and Seoul and the sole reporter/photographer/paper deliverer on The Glen Innes Examiner in country New South Wales. "All the jobs have been fascinating - and so it continues."
