Aaron Heremaia and Russell Parker celebrate. Photo / Getty Images
It's hard not to think that the good guys won last night in Melbourne. The Warriors were simply magnificent when they had every right not to be. Last week's victory over Tigers would have finished some teams.
There were concerns from within the Warriors camp that, after two draining road finals in succession, they might have been spent. Instead they got stronger. They out-ground the grinders to put themselves within one match of glory.
Even with tough as nails Manly in wait, who would bet against these Warriors now? Remarkable, really, that this team lost its first three matches of the season.
Last night in Melbourne that seemed an awfully long time ago. With the adjacent MCG hosting the AFL preliminary finals over the weekend, Melbourne was a strange setting for a match of such import. As much as the power brokers of the NRL and News Limited - entities separated by the most blurred of lines - have gone to great pains to make it so, Melbourne is not a league town.
Previews of last night's game ran a good 12 pages inside the local paper's sport's section, just after a story about football club Melbourne Victory's pre-season campaign and before an expansive section of the dresses the AFL WAGS would wear to the Brownlow Medal celebrations. Friday night's first grand final qualifier between Manly and Brisbane wasn't broadcast live in the city, with even pay TV network Fox opting to show golf, kickboxing and a rugby union replay on its three channels instead. Crowds approaching 80,000 packed into the cathedral-like MCG for the two AFL matches, with children thronging in the surrounding parks, torpedoing those strange little pig skins at each other and dreaming one day of slipping into hotpants.
There was precious little evidence of such fervour outside the beautiful AAMI Park in the hours leading up to the Warriors-Storm match, however the stadium was full enough at kick off.
It's hard not to feel for the Storm's small but fiercely loyal garrison of fans. If their team commands anything these days it is respect, both for their magnificent trio of Cam Smith, Billy Slater and Cooper Cronk, and the club's ability to bounce back from last year's self-inflicted evisceration. The one thing the Storm may never again attract from the neutral is affection. Their systematic, callous cheating over such a sustained period has seen to that. Melbourne may have enjoyed spectacular on field success during their 14 years in the competition, but much of that was a fraud.
An outpost similarly distant from the game's two major hubs of Sydney and Queensland and also with a dominant code to contend with, the Warriors have seldom approached the on-field standards set by Melbourne. But neither have they (one notable exception aside) plumbed the same depths off it.
Last night, then, was a meeting between clubs with vastly different pasts trying to carve the same future. The chance to play in an NRL final meant plenty to both. For the Storm it was an instant shot at redemption, while the Warriors would move to within one step of realising their founding dream. At half time the Warriors held a two-point lead. It could have been more, had captain Simon Mannering been able to produce a tight pass under intense pressure with the Storm severely stretched. Instead the Storm hit back from the resulting scrum, the genius Slater sending Beau Champion 70m to erase a six-point deficit.
James Maloney's late penalty goal meant the Warriors were just ahead at the break, and there they stayed for an age as the second half turned into a fascinating grind. Time and again it looked like the Warriors would seal the deal only for the opportunities to slip away.
It seemed like a recipe for a cruel defeat. But the Warriors refused to crack and Shaun Johnson finally unlocked the Storm to produce a result that somehow just seemed right.