analysis
How a blood-soaked try and unbreakable belief carried New South Wales to victory in the State of Origin decider
Bradman Best scored the crucial try as NSW pulled off a famous victory. (Getty Images: Bradley Kanaris)
A low-scoring game is a test of belief – belief in your game plan, belief in your teammates, belief in what you believe your jersey is all about.
That's why a State of Origin without many points is a game for true believers. On rugby league's biggest, toughest and most unforgiving stage, sometimes belief is all that survives.
That, more than anything else, is what took New South Wales to the edge of eternity and back again in its 14-4 win over Queensland in the decider.
There is no easy way to win at Lang Park, but surely enduring 65 tryless minutes is the hardest way of all, both mentally and physically. The longer the score stays low, the more often that all-important belief gets tested.
Can you stay the course for as long as it takes, even if you don't know how long that will be? Can you walk a hard road when the end is so far away it can't be spotted over the horizon? Do you believe, or do you just think you do?
Believing in something you can't see is called faith and in the fiery crucible of Origin football that can be a hard thing to find.
Loading...Both teams would have entered the decider thinking they had it – New South Wales because of its thumping Game II victory, and Queensland because it always seems to have it when it needs it regardless of circumstances.
Once the game begins, all that belief that feels so true and real before the match gets put to the ultimate test. You have to find it again and build it anew through adversity, which is why it's easier to construct that faith through defence rather than attack.
The nature of the low-scoring grind favours the latter and you could feel the belief growing in Queensland as they repelled New South Wales again and again through the first half. The longer the line held, the easier it was to see.
It came through in the efforts of Tom Dearden, who was such a terrier in defence under heavy pressure, and through moments like Lindsay Collins's terrific save of a Steven Crichton grubber.
And as Queensland's faith deepened, New South Wales was tested. Towards the end of the first half, they became frustrated as the beautiful patterns they discovered in Melbourne could not survive in a more northern environment.
It's difficult to keep it together when things aren't working and plenty of Blues sides have given into the panic and fear under the Lang Park lights.
The physicality and intensity were remarkable, and despite conventional wisdom suggesting that the players could not sustain the pace or the pressure, the relief never came.
This was the hard stuff, the rawest of deals, where both sides played as if they would die to win, with an edge that said if they all went to hell, it would be worth it.
The set-to which resulted in Jeremiah Nanai and Cameron Murray being sin-binned, where Murray was very fortunate not to be sent off after joining in from the bench, was a moment when things threatened to spill over in the ugliest way possible.
To their eternal credit, the Blues stayed steady through the madness. Even when they turned down field position to level the scores through Zac Lomax's penalty goal, even when a series of ruck infringements gave Queensland field position and the lead, even as time ran ever shorter, they steadied.
Kalyn Ponga stalked the sideline, haunting the edge of the match with his mere presence. Once he entered play, things went up a notch as both sides went closer to the edge of the cliff with no fear of going over the side.
The longer a game goes without a try the more explosive the moment becomes. If it goes long enough and the match is big enough, a one-metre barge over can feel like the greatest try you've ever seen.
What a try looks like matters less than what it means, but it's rare we are gifted a try like Bradman Best's effort, a score that feels worthy of the moment in its own time, the very definition of an instant classic.
The two loose offloads that got the ball to Jarome Luai were heart-attack stuff, but his decision to take on Nanai, who has struggled defensively all series, was a smart one. The effort from Best to roar up in support was mighty, his finish as brilliant as it was bloody.
As the claret spilled out of his truly gruesome lip injury, Best howled like a Blue wolf, and Kalyn Ponga and Dane Gagai, teammates of Best's at Newcastle, lay broken on the ground in his wake, it felt like watching living history.
It was the kind of try you celebrate so loudly you scare the dog, the kind of try that can silence even mighty Lang Park, the kind of try that stays alive as long as Origin is played.
That's how players become more than footballers as they carry a state on their shoulders, how a sky blue shirt becomes more than a jersey as its colour shines through the blood and how Origin – at its best – can feel like so much more than a game of football.
After that, the Blues belief was total and impenetrable, forged in the 65 minutes that came before the Best try and hammered into reality as it happened.
Even after the exhausting match that had unfolded to that point, they must have felt like they could have kept on playing for as long as it took, and if it took forever, they'd play forever.
That mentality lives in so many of these Blues – like in Isaah Yeo, who had his best game for New South Wales, and in Spencer Leniu, whose kick returns are so violent they almost feel unsuitable for younger audiences.
There is so much of it in Angus Crichton, whose journey to a deserving Wally Lewis Medal is as inspiring a story as any in recent Australian sport, and perhaps most of all in man of the match Dylan Edwards, who refuses to ever give into fatigue.
Mitchell Moses's late score was a dagger in Maroon hearts and it should be lost on nobody that it was both Blues halves who rose to the occasion when the moment was calling given how many New South Wales sides had been undone by their playmakers in the past.
Queensland never gave up the fight but their last efforts were filled with desperation as they chased a miracle that would not come.
There will be bloodletting over this, even as Queensland's courage must be hailed because it takes two sides to make a classic.
Slater's decision to omit David Fifita will be scrutinised heavily and he will need to justify the strange use of his bench – in such an arduous game, only playing Felise Kaufusi for just 16 minutes when the side was already short of forwards is a difficult move to understand.
But that's a job for tomorrow and a worry for the future. Once an Origin game is over, it belongs to history and this Blues team has found their place in forever.
By this point, everybody knows New South Wales had only won two deciders on Queensland soil before this night.
Now there are three, and the first in almost two decades, and it's the first time the Blues have had to fight right to the end to get it – their previous wins in this circumstance came by 15 and 22 points.
Every Origin team is fuelled by the actions of the players who came before them, be they from last series, past decades or last century. The past, no matter how recent, inspires the future.
The Maroons find it so easy to connect with that past and that is what makes them powerful. For New South Wales, it's less than automatic. Sometimes it's hard for them to find, which is why Queensland likes to say the Blues don't get Origin.
But they have found it now, in the kind of win every Blue should watch before every series to remember what this is all about, and surely it can't go anywhere for a while.
They've worked too hard and believed too much. The rewards for their faith should only just be beginning.