Ola Toivonen perhaps summed it up best when he said that the A-League finals series means that the rest of the season "doesn't really matter". 

For all Perth Glory's dominance and gusto over 28 rounds, Sydney FC will go down in the record books as this season's Champions. They turned up on the day and won the one that mattered most.

56,000 people - the biggest crowd in Grand Final history and 46,000 greater than the average A-League attendance - watched the goalless 120-minute spectacle.

Was the excitement of the penalties a payoff? Well, given 95% of the crowd were Perth fans (many assumably first-timers)...we'll wait and see.

Hopefully HBF Park is packed for round one this season, but if Newcastle Jets were anything to go by then a stunted, controversial Grand Final loss may do as much harm as good. Like we said, the Big Swede has a point...

Of course, there's also Mark Bosnich's old argument that perhaps we shouldn't want to listen to the Eurosnobs. That maybe the Grand Final, harking back to the old NSL traditions, is a unique Australian event that enriches the A-League, rather than demeans it.

Have we ever thought that perhaps Europe got it wrong and Australia got it right? While we'd all love a little more Serie A or Bundesliga quality on the pitch, seven consecutive titles to the same club isn't all that exciting now is it...

And after all, if the Grand Final winner doesn't offer a fair representation of an actual league season, is a league table any different?

Well, rather than set sail pretentiously into a puritanical anti-finals headwind, we thought we'd check out the statistics behind the rankings, to find out whether all this fuss over finals is founded, or merely another funnel for fan furore.

(Hint: it's always a bit of both)

FIRST, THE STATS THAT (DON'T) MATTER

Before we kick things off, because surely everyone who's reading this is as big a stats nerd we are, we thought we'd take a quick overview of the 2018/19 season as a whole:

440 Goals

557 Yellow cards

30 Red cards

3,773 Shots

1,321 Shots on target

125,425 Passes

62 Clean sheets

3,796 Fouls

40 Penalties