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As any football fan knows, there are bad grand finals, good grand finals and great grand finals.
Bad grand finals occur exactly as you expect. The team that is expected to win, wins. The team with the most prestigious players wins. The team with the most resources wins. The team that is the critical darling of the media wins.
All the wash-up from the NRL grand final:
» LORD: Gallen leads Sharks into history books
» Five talking points
» Ten best tweets from the match
» Sharks player ratings
» Storm player ratings
» Match report: Sharks’ wait over
» Re-live the match with our live blog
Good grand finals introduce a surprise factor into the mix. Either the unexpected team wins, or the losing team manages a display of bravura and flamboyance that cuts across their loss.
Great grand finals are rarer. They occur when the victory becomes central to the mythology of the team and the game as a whole.
In the last couple of years we’ve probably had two really mythical grand finals. The first was the Rabbitohs’ victory over the Bulldogs in 2014, the second was the Cowboys’ victory over the Broncos last year.
For me, the odds weren’t great on another grand final of the same magnitude in 2016.
While there were a fair share of outlier teams in the early stages of the finals – Penrith, Canberra, Cronulla – I couldn’t help but believe it would all come down to a Brisbane-Melbourne clash, or perhaps a North Queensland-Melbourne clash.
That in itself didn’t necessarily worry me – it would have been incredible, for so many reasons, to see the Cowboys take home another premiership under Johnathan Thurston.
But I felt that a Broncos or Storm win would be uneventful.
Perhaps it’s because both teams are so inextricable from the Maroons. At this stage, seeing Melbourne or Brisbane win a grand final is about as eventful as seeing Queensland win another State of Origin series.
Perhaps it’s because, under Craig Bellamy and Wayne Bennett, both teams are so suffused with professionalism that a grand final victory almost seems to be a foregone conclusion.
After all, these are the kinds of teams that train to win grand finals.
When it emerged that the grand final would be fought between Melbourne and the Sharks, the event seemed even less eventful.
Who could possibly expect Cronulla-Sutherland to beat the Storm, even at a home game?
The fact that they did is the first reason why Sunday night’s match was so momentous.
The fact that they also secured their first premiership since the foundation of the club is the second reason.
As a Wests Tigers supporter, I know that there’s a certain legitimacy that comes when you win your maiden premiership.
It promises your club a new kind of presence, something I’ve noticed as well among friends who are GWS Giants fans in the buildup to this year’s AFL grand final.
When the wait is as long as it was for Cronulla, the payoff is massive.
In effect, it was like watching the Sharks being reinstated, or forming the club afresh. I’ve never seen anything like that level of enthusiasm at a grand final, even among Souths fans.
The circulation of Harold Holt memes and porch light images on social media just reiterated how deeply embedded this victory is in Australian social history.
If that wasn’t enough, the victory took on a mythical significance for many of the individual Sharks players.
For young guns like Valentine Holmes, Chad Townsend and Sosaia Feki it was the chance to experience a grand final relatively early in their career.
For James Maloney, it was a testament to the ability of one player to guide multiple teams to finals footy.
For Luke Lewis and Chris Heighington, it was a tribute to football careers that have been bookended by finals victories – in 2003 and 2005 respectively – as well as a tribute to the longevity of the workhorses of the NRL.
However, there were three players for whom the match had a particularly special significance.
For Ben Barba, Sunday night’s match cemented 2016 as a comeback year.
While the greatest player of 2012 may have been on fire throughout much of the recent season, starting with his appearance in the Indigenous-All Stars match at the beginning of the year, the grand final victory – and his critical role in it – confirmed that this is no fluke.
Given his trials and tribulations in his journey from the Bulldogs to the Broncos to the Sharks, it was enormously moving to watch the Cronulla fullback come into his own once again.
It was also a testament to the role of indigenous players within the game, with the images of Barba’s post-match celebrations forming a lovely counterpart to Thurston’s embrace of his daughter at last year’s finals.
For Michael Ennis, things were just as emotional. His teary embrace of Brad Fittler will go down as one of the great grand final moments.
More than any other Sharks player, Ennis seemed overwhelmed by the improbability of the victory, reiterating again and again that he couldn’t believe that it had happened.
For a retiring great, there’s not better way to go out.
But it was Paul Gallen who really felt like the man of the evening.
While Gal courts a lot of controversy, I’ve always been a fan. There is no tougher job than to captain the Blues through year after year of defeat, let alone a team with the status anxieties of the Sharks.
That breeds a certain kind of resilience and a certain kind of gravity.
Seeing him after the winning try I thought back to his role in the other sky blue jersey.
With Cameron Smith on the opposite team, it felt like a weird hallucination of the definitive Blues victory we’ll probably never see, at least during the current Maroons tenure.
Cronulla fans love Gallen, and you can see why. For all his controversies, he’s the epitome of a player who has never had the luxury that comes from playing for a prestige club, or having a prestige persona.
Speaking of prestige clubs, Sunday night also felt like a critical moment in the devolution of the Storm mythology.
No image has stuck with me like that of Billy Slater gesticulating to Cooper Cronk in the sheds at halftime.
It was an image of something we’ve rarely seen from the current Melbourne line-up – desperation.
Combined with the Storm’s scrappy form over the first half, and the near-invisibility of Cronk himself, it felt like we were witnessing the end of a dynasty – or at least the beginning of the end.
Given the enormous dominance and accomplishment of Melbourne over the last decade – and the achievements of its key playmakers at an Origin level – that gave the game a different kind of mythical flavour.
Realising that football gods are human after all can be a fairly staggering experience in itself.
A couple of years ago, the Storm would have put down more points, and probably even taken it into extra time if it came to that.
And for a moment there in the dying minutes I did wonder if we were going to be looking at a 90-minute grand final.
Still, I’m glad it didn’t turn out that way. Not only would it have diluted the Sharks’ achievement, but it would have been too close to last year’s grand final.
With the Cowboys taking the Broncos into extra time once again during this year’s preliminary finals, it felt as if that narrative had come to a logical close, especially given all the close games between North Queensland and Brisbane over the course of 2016.
Instead, this year’s grand final was just what a mythical grand final should be – singular.
From Barba’s anachronistic scrum play in the opening minutes, it was clear that this was going to be unlike any other finals footy in recent memory.
The result is that the Sharks now feel as if they have a new and distinctive identity.
So, too, do the Storm, although in a different kind of way.
It’s going to be fascinating, then, to see how these teams manage over the course of 2017 – and to see how they cope with the World Club Challenge when January comes around.
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