Dragons 32
Roosters 8
Whichever club won, the 2010 grand final was always going to be about redemption.
Both sides had a list of reasons as long as a Jamie Soward punt to feel it was their time.
The Dragons' list may have been slightly shorter, but Soward's kicks were longer, they were unerring, they were decisive.
Not bad for a bloke who was dumped into reserve grade by the Roosters for being too small, too soft and too flaky.
Redemption.
Put discarded Warriors Nathan Fien on that list. After being shunted out of Auckland he will have soaked up the success in the soaking Sydney twilight.
For the Dragons fans who outnumbered their Roosters opposites to such a degree that ANZ Stadium resembled a Where's Wally convention, the success would have been sweet.
Having gone to the grand final in their first season as a merged club in 1999, St George and Illawarra fans might well have assumed their future would be drizzled with gravy. Instead it's been more tears than anything. They lost in 99 and then specialised in not even making the big show for a decade.
St George's barren run dated back to 1979. In the intervening 31 years they had tasted grand final defeat five times. Last year they topped the ladder but were rolled out of the finals with two straight defeats.
Redemption all right. Something cruelly denied the Roosters, whose first-to-last Cinderella story was cut off 80 minutes short of a fairlytale ending by a relentless red and white defensive wall.
Defence does win premierships after all.
For the Roosters it was a third straight grand final defeat. Five grand final appearances this century have yielded just one title, claimed at the Warriors' expense in 2002.
No redemption for coach Brian Smith either. The defeat took his record to four losses in four cracks at the big show.
Three of those defeats have now come at the hands of nemesis Wayne Bennett, who has a perfect seven from seven record.
The Dragons are chokers no more under Bennett.
The press box at ANZ is separated from the coaches' box by a pane of glass with some cardboard taped to it. They might was well not have bothered.
David Kidwell spent the first 50 minutes of the curtain-raiser bellowing obscenities and pounding the desk in front of him. After a third Junior Warriors try in the space of five minutes there was a particularly large thump followed by 20 minutes of silence. We feared for David.
No prizes for guessing whether or not noise control were needed when Bennett slipped into the chair. That we couldn't see him hardly mattered either.
Bennett's facial expression (if that is the right word for his deadpan mug) only needs to be sighted once to become seared into the brain.
After 80 minutes of Kidwell, being spared Smith's agonies was at least a minor blessing.
Bennett's silence was matched by the level of chatter about the match-fixing scandal that continues to bubble away in cyberspace. No one cares about such trivia on grand final day.
One thing is certain, there will be no D-Day today. No big announcements. No banishments for superstars, no matter how many viral emails and texts circulate. It's Labor Day in New South Wales. A public holiday.
No one is going to break camp to rain on the Dragons' parade, not that they could anyway.
Everybody may know someone who has a brother whose mate plays first grade but the inside information is never any different from the outside information, and always comes back to the same set of names in an email that began doing the rounds a week ago.
The NRL has done its best to squash speculation that an announcement is imminent.
They haven't, they insist, received any information from police that would allow them to act, let alone settled on sanctions for anyone implicated in wrongdoing.
That may well be because the police haven't yet even spoken to the Bulldogs players involved in the most suspect match, a round 24 fixture against the Cowboys in Townsville when bookies noted a betting plunge on the first scoring play being a penalty.
Those interviews have been scheduled for later this week.
There may well be fire to go with the match-fixing smoke, but there will be no flames to fan it today.
Today is a time for the Dragons to revel in their redemption - and for the Roosters to wonder if their day is yet to come.
