It has been nearly 30 years since the first Australian Stream Management conference. In that time the management of streams and rivers has been transformed – often for the better. Seeing past the clear challenges, the next 30 years also provides fantastic opportunities. In general, humans are pretty bad at making predictions, but in this contribution I will try to identify some opportunities, based on my experience and discussions with colleagues. Some of the opportunities include: capitalising on the natural recovery of many systems from human impacts, opportunities to remove decaying and obsolete infrastructure and reconnect rivers and floodplains, improved mesh with planning schemes that allow us to avoid future harm (and this is motivated by concern about climate change), generally better options for protecting healthy systems, better long-term funding models based on real valuation of ecosystem services, new tools that integrate observation and modelling to support better evaluation and predictions, stewardship by communities - especially empowered indigenous communities, perhaps even rivers as living entities. There are many more of course, but I will endeavour to structure these opportunities so that they (a) provide some hope, and (b) might assist in planning.