You can find a Dragons fan wherever rugby league is played and followed, but they are particularly thick on the ground at Forbes, even though the town plays under the Magpies moniker.

When Ian Walsh, who was good enough to be picked for Australia while playing for the nearby village of Eugowra, went to Sydney to ply his trade and became a Saint, he created a generation of Dragons fans in his old district - Dragons fans who created new Dragons fans as they married and indoctrinated their children.

The same process has been playing out here in Bathurst in recent years.

The deal between the Penrith Panthers and Bathurst Regional Council to host an NRL game each season has had many a short-term benefit, including the promotion of the city and the economic stimulus that a crowd of over 10,000 league fans brings to the CBD and accommodation sector.

But there's also a long game in all this.

Penrith's adoption of Bathurst as its country patch, and the players' regular coaching clinics and visits to schools, are sowing the seeds of a generation of Panthers fans here in Bathurst and surrounds - who will create new Panthers fans as they get married and indoctrinate their children.

It was a novelty in that first year, but there is an increasing easy familiarity (COVID years notwithstanding) as the Panthers players set up home here temporarily, conduct press conferences in the city and run out onto their once-a-year home ground at Carrington.

It doesn't hurt, either, that the club has had an extremely strong side for the past couple of seasons, now has a premiership in its back pocket and features country players such as Dubbo's Isaah Yeo, Forbes' Charlie Staines and Temora's Liam Martin.

Unless there's a quick and messy break-up in this flourishing relationship with Bathurst, there's a good chance that some of the big names in this Penrith side - Yeo, Nathan Cleary, Jarome Luai, James Fisher-Harris - will one day be remembered by a generation here with the same reverence given to Ian Walsh further out west.

That might end up being the true genius of this long-term league partnership - a pay-off that comes not in the first few years of the arrangement, but decades afterwards.