When Sydney FC face Western United in the A-League Women (ALW) grand final this weekend, it will draw to a close the 15th season of Australia's top-flight women's competition — now one of the longest-running women's sport leagues in the country.
Not that you'd get a sense of this history from the names and faces of the players who will take the field on Sunday afternoon.
While the Sky Blues are one of the league's foundation clubs, as well as its most successful, their squad this season has also been its youngest ever with an average age of just 21.
One reason for that is Indiana Dos Santos, the club's 15-year-old midfielder and youngest ever goal-scorer, who was one-year old when the first game of the old W-League kicked off back in October of 2008.
Western United, meanwhile, are the competition's newest team, brought in as the latest expansion franchise as the Australian Professional Leagues (APL) looks to grow the women's side of the professional game.
Three more teams are expected to follow over the next three seasons as the league aims to provide greater opportunities for Australia's next generation.
Western epitomises that: while their squad is older on average than Sydney's, the majority of their players haven't played regularly at this level before, having only ever skirted the fringes of established teams in the past or never appeared in the league at all.
This weekend's grand final, then, with this collision of old and new, represents a kind of turning-point for the ALW.
It's a fitting narrative given the year we're in, which itself represents a larger turning-point for women's football in Australia: one of those moments you can point to and say, "This is where it all changed".
Sydney FC captain Natalie Tobin knows a lot about change. Despite being just 26-years old, the defender is one of the league's oldest and most experienced players, having debuted for the Sky Blues in the 2013 grand final.
In a full-circle moment, Sunday's final will be her 100th game. So she has a greater appreciation than most of just how far the league has come since her first appearance a decade ago.
"Based on the training facilities and what we played out of, it was very much amateur back in the day," she told ABC Sport.
"I think in my first season, I didn't even get paid. In the second season, I got about $1,000.
"We used to train out of a sports high school at Seven Hills. We didn't even have access to toilets, really; you'd have to go down through a gate, put a pin into the school toilets to get in. Some people couldn't even be bothered because it was such a trek, so you'd have to go behind a fence.
"We didn't have lights so we had to train before it got dark. I think our only staff was the head coach. We had a manager who'd turn up just on the weekends, then a physio who wouldn't be there every session.
"It was pretty wild. I look back and I'm like, 'Oh, everyone had to learn to strap their own ankles and knees because we didn't have a physio,' which I'm sure led to a lot more injuries. So it's definitely come a long way."
But change does not happen out of nowhere.
It is a slow, cumulative, and sometimes painful process which does not happen without the passion and persistence of an often-unheralded group of people fighting for it from within.
Sadly, while they are the ones who started the ripples, they're also the ones sometimes forgotten as the waves start to build.
The conclusion of the 2022/23 season is also the ending of the careers of a number of legendary players such as Ellie Brush, Tara Andrews, Kim Carroll, and Teigen Allen, who departed the league with as little fan-fare and ceremony as when they entered, despite their crucial role in getting the sport to where it is now.
They follow in the footsteps of countless unheralded women who sacrificed more than they had to in order to simply play the sport they loved. That number is dwindling: at the time of writing, just four players remain active from that inaugural 2008 season: Michelle Heyman, Melissa Barbieri, Ella Mastrantonio, and Gema Simon.
These are the league's quiet forerunners; the sturdy foundation stones of the game we see today. And while they know their own retirements are on the horizon, they can rest easy knowing they have passed on the fight — as well as the faith — to those who come after them.
"It's pretty incredible what they've done for the game," Tobin said. "There's girls there who have had such a big impact on my career, and who I still look up to.
"They did the working full-time and playing W-League for so long. I get a lot of that now, but they'd done it for years and years before me.
"New girls come into our team are are like, 'This needs fixing, this is crap, we're under-resourced here,' which is true, but if you go back 10 years, you should have seen the state of the game.
"So those players all need a special pat on the back. They put up with it for so long. Even today, seeing [Sarah] Walsh on stage, chatting to Catherine Cannuli, Grace Gill: I trained and played and learned with these girls.
"I just want to thank them for their contribution. Someone like Ellie Brush advocates constantly for better resources and investment in the game. We should encourage them to stay involved, because they have brought it this far. They were there in the beginning."
But just as the work of these players on and off the field have led to tangible changes across the league, from increasingly robust collective bargaining agreements, minimum wages and facility standards, better staff resourcing, blossoming commercial interest, and greater media visibility (despite broadcast issues), their retirements are also a reminder of how much work there is still to do by those who come next.
With the Women's World Cup just three months away, the spotlight is growing ever-brighter on the state of the Australian game. Words like "legacy" are being thrown around everywhere, with decision-makers across football regularly asked how they will capitalise on this generational moment, this turning-point for the sport.
For players like Tobin, and so many others before her, the answer is simple: more. More players, more games, more clubs, more staff, more money, more exposure, more fans.
She knows what's needed; she has seen it happen slowly over the past 10 years. All she hopes is that it doesn't take another decade's worth of quiet fighting to get to where she's always wanted it to be.
"I'd like to see the game become fully-professional," she said.
"But fully-professional isn't just minimum wage and coming in from 9 to 5, because we can't live off that anymore these days when the cost of living is skyrocketing.
"The Women's World Cup will only grow the game and hopefully attract more sponsors and investment into the game, more resources for players and staff.
"We're really relying on this World Cup year for that change.
"We need to keep having girls involved; we saw what happened in England and how much they invested after the Euros, so we only need to follow suit. Then, hopefully, the Matildas will only get better as well.
"But if you don't put investment into the game, then you're not going to get anything out of it."
