Little bit of a sad one here as this is the last Premmy Files piece we’ll ever publish. The Premiership is no more. The end of an era in Aotearoa football.

As with any year, Team Wellington came into what has since become the last ever ISPS Handa Premiership planning on ultimate glory. Eleven games into the regular season that wasn’t looking especially likely. Then suddenly it all clicked.

There were many strange campaigns this season but few rival Hamilton Wanderers’. Kane Herbert’s team won each of their first three games – including a stunner 2-0 win against Auckland City - to be leading the comp after three weeks with eight goals scored.

Well that was a wild sorta season. It began with annoyances as Eastern Suburbs went down 1-0 at Kiwitea Street in week one with an Emiliano Tade penalty the difference in a game where they were thwarted by…

Three games in and it was all looking disastrous for the Dragons in what would soon be confirmed as their final ever season in existence. 3 games, 3 defeats, with 10 goals conceded, is not the way to begin a semi-final worthy season.

Let us here recap what was an outstanding game of football. A fitting farewell to the NZFC/Football Championship/Premiership after seventeen chaotic, entertaining, unpredictable, hotly debated, financially vulnerable years.

There’s no more fitting way to see the New Zealand Football Premiership into the deep looming hereafter than with an Auckland City versus Team Wellington grand final. They are after all the two dominant forces of this competition

It was longer between drinks than expected but Team Wellington and Hamilton Wanderers each got a good look at each other in the last game of the regular season, Team Welly on the winning end of a pretty thrilling 3-2 result.

Took a little while to get here but we got here in the end. The final game of the regular season. The final game ever in the existence of Hawke’s Bay United. Up against Eastern Suburbs who knew that they had no choice but to win if they wanted to extend their own season into the semi-finals.

The task was clear for the Dragons but the journey would be a perilous one. That’s because while they needed to beat the WeeNix to have any chance of making the semis, they also needed both Eastern Suburbs and Waitakere to do them inadvertent favours as well.

We’re so close to the end of this whole Premiership thing that it’s now time to start saying our farewells to some of these teams, such as the Cantab Dragons who have two more home games, maybe a semi-final if they’re lucky, and then it’s kaput.

Saturday arvo at Dave Farrington Park and it was a top four clash between two teams trying to bounce back from defeats. Team Welly were topped 3-1 by Auckland City in the Old Firm, while Eastern Subs took a shocker 4-0 loss across town in Waitakere.

It was first versus last at David Farrington Park. In some leagues around the world that fact alone is enough to make a game a forgone conclusion but not in the ISPS Handa Premiership, dear friends.

The ISPS Handa Premiership might not be the pinnacle of world football but it’s ours and it’s beautiful and it can take any league on the planet for sheer unpredictable entertainment. This weekend’s fixtures had more than enough proof of that.

Through a vintage performance and some luck with results elsewhere Auckland City got themselves back up into the familiar nest of first place in week seven. As wild as this season has been, some things are apparently untouchable.

We’re back, comrades. A few weeks off to recharge the batteries and now we get to have a geeze at which players perhaps indulged too much in the holiday festivities and which dudes were up at 6am on Boxing Day to go for a run.

Everybody sees different things, everybody brings different experiences to the table, everybody had their own ideas of how the game should be played and what constitutes a good performance. This is how the prudent and propitious pages of the Premmy Files saw things...

One last round of fixtures before the end of this mental old year and it began with a bit of Auckland City, fresh off the upset defeat in Canterbury, searching for their absent form with the Wellington Phoenix coming to town.