As Essendon supporters ponder what might’ve been, and Cronulla fans ponder what’s to come, the rest of our sports-following cohort is left to consider: is this the process we expected when drugs in sport moved to the political front-burner last February? And what’s more: is this the process we want?

Ultimately, it’s the process we probably deserve. Many of the nation’s sports fans are undoubtedly suffering from ASADA-related fatigue, and how it has depleted the oxygen for other stories, both worthy and unsavoury, in our favoured football codes. But given the moralistic positions that Australian sport has long taken on performance-enhancing drugs, there is no other way to go. The promise that rang out from the Parliament House press conference (“We will catch you”) may have implied a swift outcome. Instead, it merely affirmed the shift in the anti-doping paradigm – from a sample in a cup to this dragnet approach, a long, twilight struggle full of counter-claims and incomplete information. Look at how long it took to get Lance Armstrong, and you have a reasonable idea of the time involved.

In something like cycling, or the Olympics, this approach was tolerable. What’s been striking about the drugs scandal in our popular team sports has been to lay bare how thorny the issue is when it comes to the games we live (and die) with every day. These investigations seem interminable in the context of a football season, and even a football career. Occurring so long after the fact, their deterrent effect is dubious – if players were faced with the choice of doping to maintain their livelihood, versus the off chance of getting named and shamed well into their retirement years, it’s obvious what most would choose. Meanwhile, supporters are left to come to grips with what a tainted season means; that the result at the final siren might not be the same in a few years’ time.

That’s the very picture of a game brought into disrepute. But it all rests on the presumption that the hard line on drugs in sport remains intact. There are other ways for professional sports to go – the NFL, the model of pro league conduct, takes a rather unfussed approach to PED use, despite a history that stretches back decades. If one of its players gets caught, it’s generally a four-week suspension, kind of like what the tribunal will mete out here for a high shot. Then the player gets to come back. The league has handed out 40 such suspensions over the last two years. Compare that to the possible sanctions AFL and NRL players have been facing from ASADA ...

The reason the NFL can conduct itself in this way is because it is not a signatory to the World Anti-Doping Agency; it’ll run its $9 billion-a-year business its own way, thank you very much. That option is not really available to our footy codes for political reasons, but as these investigations continue to unspool into the long term, what constitutes the appropriate response – rather than just the moral one – to drugs in sport is bound to be asked more and more.