The NPC used to be played in the afternoon in front of large crowds with the best rugby players in New Zealand throwing the ball around.
The competition has changed - and not for the better, judging by the dwindling number of spectators.
Otago’s average home crowd last season was just 1900.
It dropped again this year to 1500-1600.
Fewer and fewer people are showing up to watch 120kg giants bash the ball up phase after phase.
The grinding, attritional nature of the rugby served up most weeks has left some people cold.
The arrival of Super Rugby in 1996 relegated the NPC to a second-tier competition.
That separation took some time to bed in. But by the time the Otago Highlanders became just the Highlanders, some of the provincial tribalism, which led to fans donning blue and gold facepaint and expressing healthy amounts of hate for Cantabrians, got watered down.
Professionalism nudged the NPC into the margins.
New Zealand Rugby did not help by tinkering with the format so often, nor have regular law changes from World Rugby done much good.
We have ended up with a game that is hard to understand and some confusing formats that made very little sense.
The world has changed, too. The weekend got eroded. People’s discretionary income has shrunk. And Sky has placed so many cameras around the ground the view is just better from your couch.
There is also an awful lot of rugby to watch - too much for people’s bandwidth. The most ardent fan gets December and January off. That’s it.
Their year starts with Super Rugby in February. Club rugby gets under way in late March. The NPC runs from early August through to the end of October. Then there is the All Blacks’ northern tour, which takes care of any spare time you have might have had in November.
It is too much, and it is the NPC some people are choosing to abandon to free up some time for the rest of life.
But there are bigger problems for the NPC than fading interest.
It is not clear where the competition sits in the rugby landscape these days.
The NPC is not the pipeline for future All Blacks it used to be. The schools and Super Rugby development programmes have increasingly got that base covered.
The competition has a grand history that will keep some of the Boomers shuffling in through the turnstiles.
But history counts for very little in a world in which words like "sustainable" and "stakeholders" slip from the Silver Lakes tongues of our administrators.
NZR has dropped enough clues for us to see where this might be heading.
The current funding cycle ends at the conclusion of the 2025 season.
What happens after that is the subject of much debate.
NZR is wrestling with that question now and has commissioned a review due out at the end of the month.
Steve Lancaster, NZR’s general manager of community rugby, would not be drawn on specifics while that work was ongoing. But he did say the funding model needed a fine-tune "rather than have an absolute revolution".
How much fine-tuning happens will hinge on whether broadcast partner Sky is still committed to providing blanket coverage.
Sky declined to be interviewed for our series. But we know it is looking at every dollar spent.
After months of negotiations with Netball New Zealand, Sky announced a one-year extension to that sport’s broadcasting agreement. But - and it was a big but - the ANZ Premiership has been slashed to two rounds in 2025.
Earlier this year, The New Zealand Herald reported the provincial unions had been warned the NPC was unlikely to have a broadcast partner from 2026 and the competition would need to be cut back.
That would represent more of a revolution than the fine-tuning Lancaster speaks about.
No NPC would be unthinkable. But the game cannot continue to rattle around in big empty stadiums either.
Tomorrow: NZR’s key man and Otago boss offer their thoughts; how the players and coaches feel.
