With so much fantastic analysis and so many memorable opinion pieces circulating on The Roar this year – let alone the media cycle at large – I thought I’d take a different approach and offer a bit of a first-hand perspective of ANZ Stadium on Wednesday night.

For one reason or another, this was my first live Origin experience and it was utterly electrifying.

Without a doubt, it was the most atmospheric live event I’ve ever attended – and I’ve seen Bruce Springsteen live.

Even at grand final, the ANZ precinct can feel a little bit anonymous. While every other Sydney venue feels organically connected with the surrounding suburbs, Homebush still comes off as a giant business park.

Sure, a full house at ANZ is always great, but even then entering and exiting the stadium can feel a little anticlimactic.

Earlier in the year, I caught the Good Friday showdown between the Rabbitohs and the Bulldogs. Even on the busiest day of the Easter Show the footy high seemed to dissipate as soon as we exited the stadium.

On Wednesday night, however, the approach to ANZ was almost as eventful as the stadium itself.

More from State of Origin 1:
» Five talking points
» The big issues examined
» The Liebke Ratings
» Laurie Daley drops a post-Origin bombshell
» State of Origin Game 1 full time: Queensland hold on to win
» All the action in our live blog

In part, that was because I came by train. With carriage after carriage and platform after platform packed with Blues fans, the excitement in the air was volatile.

Strathfield, in particular, felt like an unofficial Blues bar. While I’ve been to lots of events at ANZ, I’ve never got the train direct from Strathfield to Olympic Park – I’ve always been through Lidcombe – and the mood at the station was a perfect prologue to the atmosphere on the field.

Still, it was the connective tissue between Olympic Park station and the entrance to ANZ that was the most memorable.

Flooded in blue light, full of food trucks and populated by a crowd that was exhilarating without being overwhelming, it suddenly felt as if Homebush had always been the heartland of Sydney rugby league.

For the first time in my experience, ANZ felt like the organic and authentic home ground for the game as a whole, rather than an anonymous corporate precinct designed to centralise and rationalise the quirks and imperfections that make suburban grounds so memorable.

Normally at ANZ matches there is a very steady flow of people from the station to the gates, but last night people were just wandering and milling around in an ambient, convivial manner right up until the moments before kickoff.

The view was even more spectacular from the spiral ramps.

However, it was only upon entering the stadium that I realised how much this would exceed my experiences of watching Origin on television.

Every time I go to a match at ANZ, I’m astonished by the perspective from the upper seats.

The sight lines are so aerial and vertiginous that you feel as if you’re about to slide onto the field. It’s a perspective that makes the balletic and freeform movements of the SpiderCam particularly mesmerising.

By the time we arrived last night, however, the view was even more spectacular thanks to the steam blowing across the field as well as the epic concert style-lighting, both of which covered everything in a haze that made the play seem much closer than it actually was.

Whereas in a regular game it’s not uncommon to see one area of the stadium decked out in a particular team’s colours, the sea of blue at the New South Wales end was a spectacle that had to be seen to be believed.

All in all it had a sci-fi quality – light, haze, smoke, flames, cavernous sight lines and epic distances – that was unlike any other footy match I’ve experienced, at ANZ or elsewhere.

For a long time I’ve wanted to go to a rugby match in South Africa, since some of the newer stadiums – especially Nelson Mandela Bay Stadium in Port Elizabeth – seem to offer an architectural experience that almost exceeds the sporting experience.

Last night’s match had that epic sense of scale: although I much prefer league to Rugby, I’d never realised the extent to which Origin is league played and framed at the scale of international rugby.

By the time the Queensland side were announced the tension was almost unbearable.

When they entered the stadium – and the New South Wales team after them – the fans erupted with an intensity and passion I’ve never experienced in a live context.

You could feel the ground shuddering underneath. There was a particularly raucous collection of Blues supporters behind me who managed to yell themselves hoarse in the first five minutes.

Adding to the intensity was how quickly the game started – a brief rendition of the national anthem (sung by a friend of a friend) and then we were into the first minute.

None of the preambles and prevarications of regular footy.

From that moment on, the crowd felt like a single heaving mass. The people sitting alongside me and the people sitting at the distant reaches of the opposite side of the stadium felt like a single entity.

One of the strange byproducts of that situation was that there was almost no banter from the crowd: the stakes felt too high.

Instead there were desperate and excited collective movements as well as moments of individual public bravura from both New South Wales and Queensland supporters.

Although I was in a Blues area, there was a lone Maroons supporter at the very front who stood up to address the crowd after each Queensland victory.

On the way back down the ramp he kept on chanting “See you at Suncorp” to anyone who would listen.

While it got a bit grating after a while, it was pretty funny while it lasted and seemed to summarise a game in which individual fans had to set themselves against the crowd or be swallowed up by the collective spirit of the crowd.

For all those reasons, it often felt as if the fans were working as hard as the players. Certainly, the Blues seemed to draw on the New South Wales fan-base more viscerally and directly than any game I’ve ever seen live.

At the same time, the bad calls had a volatile ripple effect through the crowd, with a slightly riotous atmosphere breaking out in my part of the stand that saw a couple of toddlers dressed in New South Wales gear spontaneously breaking out in tears.

With a couple of intense Blues supporters behind me, I was probably closer to the maelstrom than most. Even by raucous Origin standards these guys were outliers, perpetually trying to get me in a headlock whenever New South Wales even came close to scoring and spitting out an entire mouthfeel of beer onto my head in surprise after the Josh Morris try was reversed.

If there was any moment in the game when it felt as if fans might mutiny, that was it.

Over the course of the 2016 season, the disparity between on-field and bunker callings has produced a new and visceral kind of frustration: how are players and fans meant to respond when the bunker comes in with a ruling that seems completely opposed to what they’ve seen with their own eyes and felt with their own bodies?

While he was cautious about imputing any inconsistency to the officials, Morris remains adamant that he felt the ball touch the line.

Laurie Daley has been less polite, calling for the replacement of last night’s refs when the Blues head up to Suncorp in a couple of weeks.

Whoever you agree with, there can be no doubt that the difference between the bunker’s perspective and the players’ and fans’ perspective that has characterised this season was taken to its logical extreme last night.

Normally, I’d phrase that as the difference between the camera’s perspective and the player’s perspective, but what made the Morris ruling so controversial was that even the slow-motion replays didn’t seem to conclusively support the bunker’s decision.

When so much of the play in question is invisible, you’d think that the bunker would either consistently give the try the benefit of the doubt or consistently refuse to give the try the benefit of the doubt.

From what I’ve seen this year, however, there’s no real consistency or protocol about how the bunker responds when the placement of ball to ground is as obscured and ambiguous as it was when Morris landed over the try line last night.

What was clear was that Morris perceived it as a try, the ref perceived it as a try, the Blues perceived it as a try and – perhaps most pointedly – the Maroons perceived it as a try. The few Queensland supporters around me groaned in disbelief, while it was clear from Greg Inglis’ body language and reaction that he also believed that the Blues had just won the game.

When the bunker brings in a call that is so contrary to all your bodily instincts and perceptions, it unleashes an enormously volatile and visceral frustration.

For the rest of the game that frustration hung over the New South Wales crowd, like a flammable gas that might go off at any minute.

It didn’t help, either, that the Blues debutants put in a particularly underwhelming performance, with Matt Moylan knocking on a couple of key bombs and Dylan Walker coming on in the last eleven minutes only to make an error in play-the-ball instead of providing New South Wales with the late surge they needed.

Watching it at home I would have felt nothing but frustration with some of these younger players – even Adam Reynolds wasn’t hugely impressive – but seeing it live at ANZ gave me a different kind of sympathy.

People talk about Origin as a pressure cooker, but seeing Moylan, in particular, dwarfed by all that space and fronting up against a full Queensland unit, really brought it home.

Making a debut in that environment and with the legacy of last year’s catastrophic loss in Game III was never going to be an easy task and the Maroons targeted Moylan from the very outset, until it felt as if all the volatile energy and intensity of the game was headed his way.

When he caught the ball the crowd went wild, but when he choked the crowd turned sour.

Of course, that’s always the burden and exhilaration of being a fullback.

Still, I felt there was something especially impressive about the way he managed to maintain some of his cool as the entire spectacle of the night converged on his game.

At the same time, watching him made me realise that part of the genius of a player like Johnathan Thurston is managing to do his magic invisibly, or at least managing to dodge the massive scrutiny of the crowd, cameras and other players as slyly as he did last night.

Although Thurston was present everywhere, he was visible nowhere.

Even without Michael Morgan to set Kevin Walters’ new coaching signature in place, J.T. still felt like he was in command of every key moment in the game, which only made things worse for Blues fans.

In the last ten minutes, the volatile atmosphere settled and solidified into something more sombre.

Nearly forty minutes had passed without a try and the grind had been so merciless and incessant that there hadn’t even been time or energy left over for fights, sledges or niggles (at least not that we could see).

Instead, there was the overwhelming and unbearable suspense that comes when both teams are slogging it out for the couple of points needed to win the game.

Worse, there was an overwhelming sense that history was once again going to repeat itself and gift Queensland the win.

As much as this had seemed like the game that might shake New South Wales out of the doldrums, the predictability – and familiarity – of the imminent outcome seemed to create a mood of intensely introspective frustration.

In every other footy match I’ve been to, that’s the point at which walkouts tend to occur.

What I’ve never really appreciated from watching Origin on television, however, is that walkouts aren’t really a thing in this particular context. Whether because of the price of the tickets, the prestige of the spectacle, the fact it was a home game, or sheer visceral commitment to the team, barely a Blues supporter left the building.

That might not sound like a big deal.

But for someone who has never experienced Origin live it really brought home how much the gradual trickle-out effect of fans serves to dilute the disappointment of a bad outcome.

A couple of months back I went to the Tigers game against the Storm at Leichhardt Oval. After such an upsetting result, it was a relief to be able to simply slip out the gate and sink back into the darkened path to the ca rpark.

Although it sounds like a strange thing to say as a Tigers supporter, the gradual trickle-out of fans before golden point had even ended also made the result feel less pointed and emphatic, although perhaps that was also because the fact of losing at Leichhardt Oval was particularly painful as well.

Last night, however, all the energy that is usually dispersed and diluted by the trickle-out effect was just solidified by the staunch Blues fan-base in the dying minutes of the game.

Worse, still, exiting the upper reaches of ANZ is a crowded, jam-packed process at the best of times, let alone when there’s a full stadium of fans making their way out.

By the time we got to ground level things had relaxed a bit – the rhythm of the spiral ramp can have that effect – but the last minutes of the game and the first crushed minutes of the exit were among the most intense sporting experiences I have ever had.

More than anything, they made me realise how cathartic it is to simply turn off the television or leave the pub after an Origin loss.

On the flipside, they’ve made me feel even more emotionally invested in the Blues this year.

On the back of last night’s game I’ve made up my mind to go to Game III even if they lose at Suncorp.

Ironically, Origin III will probably be a better spectacle if they do lose.

Win or lose, however, it was an addictive live experience and one I can’t wait to repeat in a couple of weeks. Go the Blues!