Finke Crows took out the iconic SANFL APY League premiership in Pukatja on Saturday, while just hours later across the border, the Waringarri Crows claimed the East Kimberley Football League flag in Kununurra.

The Crows' win over the Mimili Blues was Finke's third consecutive grand final victory in a competition contested by 12 clubs from the northern parts of South Australia, some of the Northern Territory and part of Western Australia.

Finke players, officials and supporters had to travel nearly 400 kilometres since Friday night to reach the decider, while rivals Mimili had 140 kilometres on the road to Pukatja Oval the folllowing morning.

They were met by a football field as dry as the sandhill plains surrounding its Musgrave Ranges, lines drawn by plain flour to mark the ground in the midst of outback Australia.

The all-Indigenous final series is more widespread than the APY Lands, with umpires flown in from Adelaide's SANFL lower grades or suburban affiliates to replace community volunteers at the end of the home and away season.

SANFL Head of Community Football, Shawn Ford, said the annual hype surrounding the grand final was at another level amid the tiny APY community of around 2,500 residents.

"It's been just enormous," Ford said.

"For a lot of the teams in this day and age, it's a full weekend commitment – up on a Friday and home on a Sunday – they're there with their swags and away they go.

"We couldn't be prouder of the way the season ended and the way that everyone handled themselves."

Ford witnessed "a competitive game" worthy of its billing, among several hundred spectators.

Finke scored the first goal of each quarter – beginning with the opening three goals of the match – and maintained their cushion through to the final siren in the 8.8 (56) to 6.6 (42) result.

Crows midfielder Terence Wilyuka was the standout player, awarded the best-on-ground medal.

Finke coach Matthew Lynch said two days after their grand final triumph the players, predominantly of Pitjantjatjara, Yankunytjatjara, Luritja and Southern Arrernte mob, were still soaking in the historic three-peat.

"They were all happy and some of them are still celebrating," Lynch said.

"They did all that hard work in the season."

For Lynch, another grand final berth had previously seemed out of reach. Finke started the season poorly and were no certainty to make the final series, let alone a place in the grand final.

"I was going to give it a rest this year; I had won two premierships and I thought it was time for me to sit back, you know with work and family, but the boys kept saying, 'Nah, we need you, you're the best coach, we need you back', after they lost a couple of games," he said.

"I was like, 'Okay, I will support you guys', and we started winning just about every game then."

It was a similar story for the other mob of Crows.

For Waringarri, the road was short to Kununurra Oval – one of the three clubs living within its town boundaries – but the journey to the East Kimberley grand final was still long and arduous.

The Crows had won just twice in their opening nine fixtures, including conceding a forfeit, amid the modified five-team league before they turned the competition on its head.

Before the start of the 2023 competition the tyranny of distance split the league into a north and south division, which saw the competition effectively played separately within the East Kimberley region.

But the south division stopped operating at the end of its first year, leaving the north to six sides and fielding just five two years later after Bow River withdrew.

"We definitely felt we were underdogs," Waringarri coach Josh Lewis said.

"The feeling within the competition is we shouldn't have been there. Four or five games before (finals), we were dead last.

"So going into the last two rounds of the season, we won both of those games (to make the finals) against sides above us.

"We ended up finishing fourth, but we didn't have the continuity of wins leading into finals did leave us in doubt. But we did have faith we could peak at the right time."

Waringarri scraped into the top-four finals series on percentage following its third and fourth wins of the season over Ord River and Kununurra.

The Crows survived Kununurra again in consecutive weeks amid an eight-point victory in the elimination semi-final and caused a boilover against minor premiers Port Wyndham by seven points.

In the grand final Waringarri defeated Ord River 16.2 (98) to 11.6 (72) in the club's first premiership since 2016.

"Definitely within the playing group that when we started winning, we thought internally we had what it takes," Lewis said.

"We knew we were good enough to beat any of the other teams on our day.

"Once we made it to finals, we just thought let's go out there and have fun. We had already exceeded any expectation placed upon ourselves as there's a lot the club went through that other people didn't know about."

Waringarri lost a former team member who passed away during the season. On celebrating the side's grand final victory a teammate lifted his No.21 guernsey as a mark of respect.

Lewis coached the club to its 2023 grand final loss but returned to Port Wyndham to coach his former club in 2024 – the same year Waringarri made another painstaking grand final – before feeling a measure of justice for the Crows' painful losses.

"To have a win like that, well, the 24 guys that stepped out on the park needed to play their part, especially to beat a side like the Magpies that are well-drilled, well-trained that play good footy," he said.