AFL season 2022 has rewritten the rule book on how the game should be played.

First of all, there was the amount of good news stories surrounding Geelong's 2022 triumph. The likes of warrior skipper Joel Selwood. Ageless key forward Tom Hawkins, who seems to keep getting better. Irishman Zac Tuohy, finally rewarded in his 250th AFL game. The stunning redemption of small forward Tyson Stengle. And so on.

On a team level, it's certainly hard to think of a premiership more deserved or harder-earned than the Cats' success. They have defied not just the odds and football history, last Saturday fielding not just the oldest premiership team, but the oldest team ever to take the field in a VFL/AFL match, but also given the proverbial "you were wrong" to a considerable army of doubters who sought to write them off at every turn.

And there were plenty of those following the club's 2011 flag. There were five preliminary final defeats and a grand final loss, a couple of those losses seemingly era-ending thrashings. There was one year, 2015, when Geelong missed out on finals altogether, then 2018, when the Cats were belted in an elimination final.

Popular wisdom dictated each of those reversals might have been the cue to scrap the template and start again. But the Cats have continued to simultaneously contend yet still develop for the future. Maybe in doing so they have rewritten the rule book.

And on a broader level, maybe season 2022 has rewritten the rule book on how the game is and should be played.

In my view, this has been the best AFL season since at least 2009, chock full of great stories and exciting games. Yes, that's a personal observation, but the numbers from official AFL statistics provider Champion Data genuinely back up that contention.

Scoring, a continual bugbear in recent times, finally started moving in the right direction. In 2022, teams scored an average of 83.1 points per game, the highest figure since 2018. Teams scored from on average 43.3 per cent of their inside 50 entries, the highest percentage since 2018.

But it's not just about scoring, it's about ball movement, the sort of end-to-end football which so captivated people during the 1980s and '90s.

In 2022, teams managed to transition from their defensive zones to forwards zones just on 21 per cent of occasions, a figure which along with last year are the two highest percentages since 2016. We're seeing more kicking of the football, too. In 2022, the AFL average kick-to-handball ratio was 1.50:1. That's the highest figure since 2006. That's significant in anyone's language.

Ironically, given the 81-point margin in this year's grand final, we're seeing much less lopsided football and closer games more often. There were just 10 of 207 games this AFL season in which margins blew out past 75 points. That's the fewest since 2003, and almost half as many as we were witnessing in the last decade.

And this was the third season in a row (excluding the rarified 2020, in which we had shortened games) in which we've had average margins (30.6 this season) lower than at any time since 1990.

All should have given one man in particular in the victorious Geelong rooms late last Saturday afternoon reason to smile. Steve Hocking is back at his original club as chief executive after an eventful and at-times controversial stint as the AFL's football operations manager.

Like any person occupying such a role, he was always the target of much criticism and precious little praise, always in a no-win situation with people who moaned about the unattractive state of the game, but were dead against any sorts of rule changes to attempt to take it to a better place.

But the 6-6-6 rule at centre bounces has given forwards much-needed space in one-on-one contests, and prevented teams with narrow leads late in games simply blocking up one end to remove any chance from their opponent.

The much-criticised "stand" rule has also opened up corridor play, with the game speeding up as a result. Look, for example, at the exciting style of football behind Collingwood's dramatic and unexpected rise this season. Would that have been possible without those rule changes or various other tweaks? It's doubtful.

The curve of improvement still has some way to travel, but after a few years in which it seemed the game was seemingly stuck in a holding pattern of dour overly-defensive football, there is justified optimism about its health once more.

Not to mention justified joy for some of us more senior citizens in Geelong's triumph that reaching a certain age needn't mean the end of the line. If you're one of them, and a football purist to boot, last Saturday felt particularly sweet.