I enjoyed wildcard round, I’m just not ready to tell you whether I liked it. There is a difference.

By almost every immediate measure, the AFL would be thrilled with what unfolded over the weekend.

The two biggest clubs playing, more than 81,000 people turned up on Friday night, more than 91,000 on Saturday. Two close, high-pressure games with seasons on the line. As a weekend of football, it was brilliant.

But I have one question for everyone who has already declared wildcard round an overwhelming success: would you still love the concept if both games had been terrible?

Because if you like wildcard as a concept, you have to be prepared to like it when the games aren’t close. If both matches had been 50-point blowouts, would we still be talking about what a brilliant addition it is to the AFL calendar?

If the answer is no, perhaps what you loved wasn’t wildcard round. You just loved two really good games of football. So did I.

That doesn’t mean I’m against expanding the finals series. With Tasmania joining the competition in the next couple of years and a 20th team surely following at some point, it’s reasonable to question whether eight finalists will remain the right number.

What I’m less sure about is whether wildcard is the right way to do it, particularly because of what it could do to the rest of the finals series.

Under the traditional top-eight system, there were essentially two tiers. Finish in the top four and you earned the significant advantage of a double chance. Finish fifth through eighth and you entered an elimination final. Your path was harder, but those four teams started September from broadly the same position.

Wildcard has effectively created a third tier. The top four still receive the biggest reward. Fifth and sixth now have an advantage over those below them, while seventh through tenth have another hurdle entirely, needing to survive an elimination game before the traditional finals even begin.

Maybe that’s a good thing. After a long home-and-away season, finishing higher should give you a significantly easier path to a premiership, but at what point does a difficult path become an almost impossible one? That’s why I don’t think anyone can properly judge wildcard round yet. So far, we’ve only seen the first part of the experiment.

The two teams that survived wildcard have just played physically and emotionally taxing games with their seasons on the line. They now face fifth and sixth, who have had the luxury of a week off. If that results in two tired teams being comfortably beaten, wildcard hasn’t just affected seventh through tenth; it has potentially handed fifth and sixth an easier first final too.

And that’s where the domino effect becomes interesting. If fifth and sixth progress after relatively comfortable wins, does that leave them fresher for the following week? Suddenly one extra game at the start of the finals series has potentially influenced several games that follow it.

Maybe none of that happens.

It helps Carlton seem to be on an absolute heater at the moment and the Western Bulldogs proved everyone wrong in 2016 too, so perhaps they come out firing this weekend and we get another two brilliant contests.

If so, I’ll be far more convinced. But if we’ve created one great weekend at the expense of the next one, we need to factor that in when deciding whether wildcard actually works.

More than 170,000 people through the gates and two close games tell me the weekend was a success. They don’t tell me the system is.

Two great games are enough to call it a great weekend of footy but it’s not enough to call wildcard a great finals system just yet.