BY DAN

If you’re anything like me you’ve now watched Seb Kris’ match winner somewhere between 1800 and 4 billion times.

I’ve watched the Fox version. I’ve listened to the Triple M version. I’ve watched Freddy Fittler scream “one good play” so many times I’ve been mumbling it to myself while I perform other mundane tasks (mental note: do not mumble while using public toilet). I’ve watched the Titanic version (thanks JB and the Green Machine Podcast). I’ve seen frame-by-frame cut up in a group chat. If there’s an ESPN Deportes or a French or a Japanese version I’d be checking that too.

It’s one of those moments. Let me live it. Let me breathe it. Let me talk about it with every like-minded individual I can find, and some people who aren’t like-minded but just got caught in the backdraft. Let’s all just stare at it like Chevy Stewart. Dumb-founded but happy. Or hug like Stick did Andrew Bishop and Corey Horsburgh and the runner who I didn’t immediately recognise.

So maybe we’re dwelling. That’s the fun of a Thursday game. You get to live it for a few days extra. It’s OK when it’s this amazing to spend a bit more time with it. That’s good in fact. Normal. To paraphrase my good friend Carlotta, these things do not happen. Not usually.

Teams don’t normally score game winning tries on the hooter from their own side of half way. Those tries don’t normally go through approximately 19 sets of hands. They don’t normally involve a grubber from a winger on wrong side of the field, back to where he should be, that bounces both terribly and perfectly for the Milk. It rarely leads to a player with the confidence of a maimed stoat executing a perfect flick pass while wrestling a defender with his off-hand. Or another player, a second-rower manufactured from a centre, who is momentarily a (right) centre again, finding a pass in contact, and it landing in the hands of the left centre. Who’s on the right side of the field.

It makes no sense. But it also makes heaps of sense. If you watch it. From different angles. Again, and again, and again. Moments that catalyse some sort of truth about a football team, that bring joy to every day existence, and somehow meld the two into a perfect encapsulation of why we love sport and why we love these idiots. Truth, beauty, and a flick-pass or two.

There are a few truths we can take from this. One is that Canberra are not beholden to structure. So often that is something we complain about, but it is lack of structure that saw Xavier Savage stroll across field to be nearer to the ball as it headed away from him at the start of that last play. Play what you see. Be where you’re needed. The Raiders aren’t your buttoned down Glen Miller Band! They get in the mood by getting funkadelic.

It also was telling that they never gave up. Not on the game, not on the play. Savage comes from the other side to get it on the left. Seb does similar to be there for the final pass. There’s somewhere between five and seventeen Canberra players in the vicinity of the ball. If a defender had been there to take Seb he had a baker’s choice (not a phrase) of players to pass to. There wasn’t another defender this side of the Murrumbidgee. If that’s something that can be bottled and brought every week it can raise this side’s floor so dramatically.

What does it all mean? Maybe this is another weird moment in a team that specialises in them. An oddity that sickos like us revel in for time immemorial whenever we want to speak that about these things like it’s our own special language. Paul Vaughan and the Storm. Rapana’s try off the Austin kick. Jimmy Thrills in Melbourne. You’ve all got a favourite. A moment where the Raiders did something stunning but it only had a fleeting impact. A ray of sunshine in a cloudy season. That’s the most likely outcome. Occam’s shaving and all that.

Maybe it washes away the sins of weeks past. Maybe it makes us forget those sins and atone for them. Maybe we just plain forget the 79 minutes of hard fought footy before it, not learning the lessons. Not fixing the problems.

Or maybe it was finding the general in the specific. The truth of a side encapsulated in a single moment. A tale of possibility in one good play. Maybe Canberra’s arrow shaped attack that relies on hitting lines with pace and intensity, and pouring through the middle looking for an opportunity, was proven in that moment.

I’m not sure. Better watch it again.

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