It has been an alert-level ravaged competition, complete with a month-long break, friendly games, empty stadiums, no promotion-relegation, and three teams missing.
So, why should we care when Otago runs out in Championship final against Taranaki, in Inglewood on Saturday?
It seems a far-cry from that day in 1998, when Otago lifted the NPC trophy for the second time after a fever-pitch final.
Sports teams these days talk about ‘‘knowing your why’’.
Why are you playing? What is the reason you are doing this? Where are you drawing your motivation from?
It provides purpose to what they are doing.
Perhaps as fans, that is what we need to do as well.
It is easy to put the asterix next to this year’s competition, to say that it does not mean what it used to.
Sometimes you have to dig a bit deeper - if you do not know your why, find it.
A hark back 23 years ago, when Otago beat Waikato 49-20 in that glorious final, might help provide that.
It was a hot and windy day, but it was rugby that filled the Dunedin atmosphere.
A sold out crowd of 40,000 packed into Carisbrook for quite possibly the city’s biggest event of the past 25 years - only the Ed Sheeran concerts of 2018 have really matched it.
Even for those not there it was impossible not to be caught up in the occasion.
This was peak Rugby City.
As then-Otago Daily Times rugby writer Brent Edwards wrote, it was a ‘‘week of rugby madness, an impromptu party’’.
It still evokes chills watching Taine Randell emerge from the changing rooms, giving a final eye brow flick upon receiving the ball to lead the team out into the cauldron.
The scenes that ensued have long burnt into memory.
John Leslie scoring in his final game, Brendon Laney conjuring up two tries from absolutely nowhere, Romi Ropati’s iconic karate kick after scoring in the scoreboard corner.
It was late in that completely and utterly dominant second half that the chant of ‘‘we’ve won the final’’ rang out around the ground.
Even a test match no longer gives you that same atmosphere.
A World Cup knockout game perhaps approaches it.
But that Dunedin rugby atmosphere which existed through this era was something unique.
That was 23 years ago. I was five. It was the game that swept me up and ignited a passion for sports - as it would have for many others of my generation.
Times have changed since then.
Could you imagine a dropping a rugby-mad 12-year-old Kiwi kid into Carisbrook that day and telling them that this, all of this hype, is for the NPC?
Telling them that 15 past, present or future All Blacks, as well as five other future internationals, are in this Otago squad playing provincial rugby? It would be difficult to comprehend.
Crowds are no longer what they were - even prior to Covid-19. Yet this is still Otago playing in a final.
The Championship final, sure, and Inglewood under Alert Level 2, in 2021, is certainly not Carisbrook, in 1998, with the pandemic 21 years away.
But it is a final being played by a team wearing the same blue and gold nonetheless.
It is hard not to connect it to that heyday of provincial rugby — even if just to catch the faintest whiff of that distantly familiar feeling, nowadays all wrapped up in romanticised nostalgia, but somehow still ever-present.
And that is why Saturday’s match matters.
Why provincial rugby still, in this era of increasing professionalism and focus on the elite level, has a significant place.
It is one of the few sporting competitions where straight provincial competition - which in Otago rugby’s case has extended 141 years - remains as true as ever.
