If you give Nathan Cleary enough time he could beat down a mountain. If you gave him enough time he could dig all the way down to hell.
If you give him enough time there is nothing his iron will cannot accomplish.
Brisbane will forever regret giving him enough time. They had the Panthers down but not out, because they’re never really out, not until the siren goes and the confetti falls down.
It is wrong to call Penrith’s 26-24 victory a miracle, because a miracle is when God makes the impossible possible. To this team it must feel like there is nothing they cannot achieve as long as they’ve got enough muscle and blood and skin and bone to keep throwing themselves around.
They were gone. Buried. Cut apart by the blazing Ezra Mam, the mighty Payne Haas and the rest of a Broncos side who were so close to winning it all they could just about taste the XXXX.
Jarome Luai’s shoulder was busted. Izack Tago came off as well.
But the Panthers had Cleary and through him, all things could be done.
It was the performance of a lifetime from the Penrith skipper, one that cements his place among the great halfbacks of the modern age.
That must have felt far away when Mam and Reece Walsh were blowing past him, but Cleary does not ever stop. It is his greatest strength, his superpower, the thing that took him from a bench hooker in the Panthers’ junior reps sides to the highest highs his sport can provide.
Because of Cleary’s success and his youth, there is a temptation to compare him to the likes of Andrew Johns and Johnathan Thurston, or the other dazzling playmakers of past years.
It means the backlash against his failures are brutal, swift and furious. He did not ask to be anointed before his time, but that does not stop people blaming him for it.
But Cleary, who has always had a better grasp of his strengths as a player than the media hype machine that rages around him, is often the first to say that his abilities are not natural – they are things he learned how to do by doing them over and over and over again, working until what was learned seemed instinctive to the untrained eye.
And all that only comes if you won’t stop, ever, even when it looks like you should, even when the staunchest Panther believer would have been thinking about how to best avoid the maroon and gold horde that descended on Stadium Australia.
Cleary is not a magician, he is a blacksmith. He, like his team, hammers the iron relentlessly until it bends into the shape he wants.
He is part of a wonderful system at Penrith, this is true. But he drives that system as much as anyone and his attitude towards football is reflected across the club.
He takes after Cooper Cronk, another great of the game whose success was a thing he willed into reality rather than an extension of natural gifts. Cronk was not of a system, he was the system and so is Cleary.
His moments of brilliance in the second half, when Penrith were down by 16 and looking gone, were of execution, preparation and Penrith’s best friend – blunt-force trauma.
He beat Kurt Capewell for Moses Leota’s try through his fitness. He kicked a 40/20 on the next set because he saw Walsh was out of position.
When Stephen Crichton was slowly getting on the good side of his battle with Kotoni Staggs, Cleary got it to him early and he plunged over.
And then, with barely a couple of minutes remaining, he took the Broncos on close to the line, direct and strong and hard, and all those hours and hours he spent honing his craft paid off, as they have so many times over the last four years.
The Panthers are the first team in 40 years to win three straight premierships. The stand alongside any team who has ever played this game.
There is no more debate about who wears the crown as the best team of the NRL era and that’s a crown that’s made not of gold, but of black iron.
Cleary is now just the third man ever to win multiple Clive Churchill Medals. He has won as many premierships as starting half as Thurston and Johns combined.
It still feels like this run has plenty left in it. Both he and the Panthers have more to do.
But surely, even if they somehow win a fourth straight premiership in 2024, it cannot be better than this night, either for Cleary or the Panthers.
Their first title was the result of a mighty team struggle and their second an exhibition of their mastery of their art.
This one belongs to all of them – it belongs to Leota, who was Penrith’s second-best player, and to Crichton, who grew into the match as it went on and looked more and more dangerous with every touch, and to Mitch Kenny, who scored the second try of his NRL career in his 83rd appearance.
It belongs to Panthers football chief executive Matt Cameron and recruitment man Jim Jones, who did so much to build this monster of a team, and to coach Ivan Cleary, who unleashed them upon an unsuspecting world.
But, most of all, it belongs to Cleary. He is a marvel of science and honed skill with a will that cannot be broken.
The cause is never lost as long as there’s time on the clock, air in his lungs and a football in his hand.
Through that unbreakable will he created a masterpiece from scrap metal.
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