IN THE minute before the ball was bounced on Saturday, I realised our game had changed significantly. For the first time ever, I couldn't hear the eruption of crowd noise that precedes the first bounce. Instead, I heard a marketing trick - the final minute being counted down, second by second, by what sounded like clapping hands.

The VFL/AFL grand final has been generating its own unique form of excitement for more than 100 years. No one I know has ever said that going to a grand final is not sufficiently exciting for them, that they would like the AFL to pump it up with special effects to get them in the mood. (Like I never met a supporter - not even in the old days of black and white TV - who expressed a need or a desire to see the introduction of away jumpers.)

If you ask people who have attended a grand final what most excited them about the event, they invariably say: ''The atmosphere.'' Integral to that atmosphere is the sound of the crowd. It's not a constant. It builds and settles and erupts and moves on. In past years, before the game, the two sets of supporters have echoed ghostly chants to one another that resonate through the stadium, then fade, then grow again.

In the minute or so preceding the first bounce, the noise accelerates and then, just before the first bounce, it drops away. The crowd collectively holds its breath. Well, that was lost this year. In a triumph of the artificially manufactured over the spontaneous and authentic, we got an effect that belonged in a computer game.