Some NRL Finals vanish as soon as the siren goes. Others leave marks. They hang around in your head long after the confetti’s been swept away. Not because of the scoreline, but because of how they felt in the moment. With a new finals coming up on the 5th of October, it’s time to let the fans and Rugby Championship betting enthusiasts look back on some of those unforgettable moments.
The 2015 grand final is still the benchmark. Cowboys v Broncos, a Queensland derby that dragged into golden point. The tensions were high and you could feel it all around. Johnathan Thurston, limping, shoulders tight, lining up a kick that would either make history or break the hearts of the loyal Cowboys fans. The ball curled through, and the stadium didn’t just cheer, it erupted. A 17–16 win that gave North Queensland their first title. Not just a game, a fairytale delivered under floodlights.
Then you’ve got the other end of the spectrum: 2008. Manly hammering Melbourne 40–0. Finals aren’t supposed to be like that. A grand final should be a nail-biter, something that twists in the gut until the last play. Instead, Manly turned it into a demolition job. Clinical, ruthless, humiliating for the Storm. Ask fans where they were that day, they’ll tell you. Blowouts fade in the regular season. Not in a grand final.
Older heads still talk about 1998. The Bulldogs fighting their way into the decider, only to crash into Brisbane’s machine. The Broncos didn’t just win, they smothered Canterbury, showing what finals football does to dreamers who run out of gas. It was cruel, but it was also unforgettable. That’s finals footy: it gives, it takes, it doesn’t apologise.
And then there are the games that sneak up on you, the ones that don’t look like folklore until you’re rewatching them at two in the morning. Brisbane against Canberra this year is one of those. Raiders flying, Broncos done and dusted, Walsh in the bin. Then something shifted. Brisbane made their way back, pushed it to extra time, and Ben Hunt drilled a 38-metre field goal in the 94th minute. A quarterfinal shouldn’t feel that seismic. But it did.
What ties all of these together isn’t just results. It’s the way finals twist emotions. The golden point fairytales, the blowouts that defy belief, the comebacks that rewrite logic. Finals are the stage where little errors become scars, where lucky bounces turn into legends. Players talk about pressure, but pressure doesn’t cover it. It’s something rawer. The whole season funneled into eighty minutes where careers can tilt on a single kick.
Fans carry that too. Ask a Manly supporter about 2008 and they’ll smile wide. Ask a Storm fan and you’ll see the pain. Thurston’s kick doesn’t just belong to Cowboys fans — it belongs to anyone who has ever ridden the sport for its stories. Finals share themselves like that.
And now October 5 looms. Another series, another chance for the game to write itself into memory. Nobody knows what shape it will take. Could be a miracle comeback, could be a crushing rout, could be something so strange we don’t even have the words yet. That’s the point. The NRL Finals don’t hand you neat endings. They give you nights that stick.
