As a journalist, the last few days of revelations, first from the Essendon Football Club, and more recently from all sporting codes, have been a treasure trove, positively brimming with tales of alleged secret doping, mysterious waiver forms, match fixing and systemic drug use.
As a sports journalist, it shattered the naïve illusion I had that Australian sport was immune from most of those things.
As an Essendon supporter, well, I can't even begin to tell you the heartbreak and anger it has provoked.
Of course, these are just allegations and I pray that the investigations will clear the vast majority of sports, clubs and athletes of any wrongdoing.
But the perfect sporting bubble that we all thought we lived in, here in Australia, has been well and truly burst.
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Integrity in sport is something very close to the hearts of all Australians. From the first game of backyard cricket or football that we play, cheating is just not on. You could alienate an entire class at school with one shifty move. It's something inherent in everything we do all the way up to professional level.
Something as relatively harmless as feigning injury, which still appears to run rife in football but not many other sports, is often enough to turn fans off an entire sporting code.
How are we to fathom drugs and match fixing being rampant in our favourite sports?
This week has been described as the darkest chapter in Australian sports history. I disagree on two fronts. First, no-one has been charged with anything yet – all we have are suspicions and un-named offenders. Second, and most importantly, this should instead be the moment we finally see our sports clearly.
We have lost our innocence, but we can now look into all our sporting codes with the precision required to rid them of organised crime and systemic cheating. We can now shine a light into the darkest recesses of our nation's sporting clubs and view them with a cynicism which we never thought we'd need. Clearly we do.
We can all only hope that the Australian Crime Commission report is the extent of the problem. We can hope that the 'multiple players' and 'a number of clubs' referred to in the report are as few as possible. To uncover an entire sporting code where drugs are commonplace would do irreparable damage.
But we have to be prepared for that. The sporting landscape has changed forever.
