If he was feeling a little wistful as he surveyed what was a truly unique scene, he didn't show it. Then again, he never does, does he?
"I get emotional, I just don't show it much," he said.
Walking away from the club will have certainly been an emotional decision. But it was also an intensely practical one. It's probable Cleary simply read the tea leaves and divined the best option for his long-term career prospects was to accept Penrith's three-year offer.
But it's hard to imagine he would have come to that decision had he felt he had the full backing of the club's powerbrokers.
When Penrith's Phil Gould first came calling, Cleary insisted he fully intended to see out the remaining 18 months of his Warriors contract.
Chief executive Wayne Scurrah says the club planned to review his contract with a view to extending it at the end of the current season.
But the ground shifted quickly, seemingly destabilised by a four-match losing run between two byes.
Tomorrow we will discover whether the decision to grant Cleary his leave at that low ebb will prove a moment of weakness that has cost the club a premiership-winning coach.
Cleary, too, may be left to ponder how those contract talks may have panned out had he held his nerve a little longer.
He pointedly dodged questions about whether he would have stayed had the Warriors matched Penrith's offer. But, with his family settled in Auckland, it's hard to imagine he would have simply walked out on a club he has served as a player and coach for the best part of the decade.
Should the Warriors win tomorrow, the club will most certainly look to paper over the unpalatable PR aspects of Cleary's departure by pointing to it as a prime motivator of this season's success. The "doing it for Ivan" spiel, however, doesn't quite stack up. As Cleary has often pointed out, it's not about him. Then there is this from captain Simon Mannering: "Ivan hasn't talked about it much and we haven't really as players either. Ever since he announced it, he wanted it to be that way.
"But I guess it is in the back of your mind that he is not going to be there next year. He has definitely done a lot for me as a player and I'm sure a lot of the other guys as well."
The reality is that players and coaches leave clubs every year. Every team likes to mark those departures with a championship season, but only one club achieves it.
Cleary got close to claiming a premiership with the 2002 Warriors and he will be drawing on that experience as he tries to go one better as a coach.
"The similarities for me is that it's the last action for the club on both fronts, so there's a little bit of nostalgia," he said. "But I have so many more people to be thinking of than myself. It's different in that sense. It's almost better as a coach because the pride you feel leading the guys. But I am the same as a player, I have a job to do and I need to make sure that, while I enjoy the hoopla around it all, I get the job done.
"It's all about really focusing on the game itself. Even when you get to the ground, the atmosphere, the arena, it's all dynamic. It's just amazing. But once the ball gets kicked, it's another game."
His memories from 2002 are of the game racing by and then watching the Roosters celebrate.
"It goes pretty quick when you are out there. I remember standing in the in-goal area the most of the second half, so it wasn't a great feeling.
"When the game's over and you're not being surrounded and all the cameras and everyone are going over to someone else - for me it was a lot of my friends because I had come from the Roosters - it's not a good feeling. Until you actually experience that feeling you don't understand how big a grand final is. Hopefully that changes this week."
Whether or not it does, Cleary's demeanour is unlikely to change much. "As long as the boys give their best performance, I will be a happy man," he said. We'll probably have to take his word for it on that.
