Aisle be Back: The Afterglow of your Hurricanes final win

Hurricanes players celebrating during their win last Saturday. Photo: Mike Lewis Pictures.

• By Kevin McCarthy

10 minutes into the second half. The Hurricanes have just notched up 41 points …. To nil.

The woman next to me says: Good Game! I agree and add that I’ve never seen anything like it, 41-nil this early in a grand final.

She replies: Oh well, too early to say it’s over.

That ladies and gentlemen is a true Hurricanes supporter. It ain’t over until the rotund soprano sings. On a bad day, so true.

Except it was not a bad day. Just under 34 thousand people seconds later had decided it was over. When the crowd begins hitting the chorus in Country Roads four times, the last time spontaneously, it was over. Extraordinary stuff.

Perhaps it was over five minutes in, when the Chiefs’ kicking game first encountered the swirling cyclonic stadium wind machine. Touch flags facing four directions at the same moment. Or not long afterwards when the Canes were finding tons of space down the right flank for Josh Moorby.

Anyone who spent time on the Millard Stand might recall the halftime game of guessing how much the wind advantage had been worth. 10 points, 15 points? Famously, there was Trapper’s test where Dave Loveridge defended a slender 9-nil All Blacks lead over the Lions with a box kicking masterclass.

On Saturday, it seemed as if the wind advantage counted for absolutely nothing. Because the Chiefs could make no headway, could never stake out  any pressure on the Canes line.

I’m still shaking my head. I probably never will process that win. It was certainly a privileged night to be there.

Immediately the parlour game began for some of whether this was the best super rugby final finals performance of all time. Was this side the best club side in the world? Do you know what? Who cares.

There are no valid ways to compare eras – or championships. The 2016 Year of Miracles will never be seen again. There won’t be another 2026 thrashing on this scale.

Both champion outfits stand alone in their own way. It should be enough to leave it at that.

Fantastic to see so many there on the night. You can’t hope to fill every seat every game, but hopefully a few fence sitters will have fallen in love with the live rugby experience again and will turn out again more often in 2027.

And full praise to the Chiefs fans who sat out that match to the end. I never saw or heard a cowbell, and the in-match experience must have been like dentistry in the days of the school murder house.

Thankfully too there was no gratuitous trolling of them on the way out. I mean, what was the point, and we’d all been that dejected fan at some other point.

I usually take the rat run route out of the stadium that goes past the rail yards. Some incoming train driver let rip a good minute’s worth of airhorn as they trundled into the title town. Another fan noted that perhaps that was almost too much.

No mate, it wasn’t. The Cane Train was coming home.