Sport is a great community builder and the parochialism that inter-town sport can generate is one of the great things about living in regional Australia.

On Saturday, the Bathurst Bulldogs will be chasing a piece of history when the club fields side in all five grades of the Central West Rugby Union competition.

If they can win them all, Bulldogs will become the first club to complete the clean sweep and we can be sure that's a record that would stand for many years to come.

Countless hours of planning and hard work - on and off the field - has gone into what is already an outstanding achievement for the club, and any victories on Saturday would be the icing on the cake.

Five victories would be incredible.

But rugby is just the first cab off the rank in what is going to be another finals season for Bathurst teams.

There is still rugby league, hockey, Australian rules, soccer and netball to come - just to name a few. And that's before we look at national competitions. It's a case of too much sport is never enough, but there is no shame in that for Australians.

While other countries might sneer at Australians' apparent obsession with sport, there are many far worse obsessions around.

And what other countries might not understand about Australia is that it is not actually the sport that is most important but, rather, what it represents.

It is a privilege for us to live in a country that has the luxury of caring about who wins on the weekend. Citizens of impoverished, war-torn nations do not enjoy such freedom.

And we should be grateful that this is a nation that fights most contests in sporting arenas rather than on battlefields.

So when we cheer our teams in the finals this year, we can be also be cheering so much more.