As a Penrith Panthers fan, I’m living the dream of their sustained success
When we run out on Sunday I won’t worry about what might happen, I’m not concerned with titles (but we’re going to win!)
I love the Penrith Panthers too much. That’s not altogether unusual. Loving your team too much is what sports fandom is all about – irrational levels of devotion to something that ultimately doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things.
Traditional Guardian readers might understand this passion as the way they feel when, say, they see an interesting bird, or when a new adaptation of play gets a three star review that reads like a four, or perhaps when there’s a new treatise about a minor inconvenience caused by a local council.
Passion comes in all forms. I have written extensively, some would say far too often, about what this passion means to me personally. How it goes beyond simple fandom and is channelled into community pride from a home that is more often the source of ridicule. But what is most unusual about this kind of passion is that it is not supposed to be rewarded. Loving your football team is supposed to be an effort in endurance that teaches us how to suffer heartbreak and come out the other side still capable of hope. We are all used to that experience. We understand how to cope with that. What is new and what is strange is the idea of sustained success.
This is the dream. Perhaps that’s underselling it. Rugby league fans don’t really dream of this kind of sustained success. You dream about things that are more likely – say, winning the lottery, or being pulled out of the crowd to kick the game-winning conversion. You certainly don’t dream about being on the verge of a three-peat. That’s a little too absurd, even for fantasy. The good times cannot last. The universe would not allow it. It would violate a law of thermodynamics.
Traditionally, you would spend an article like this trashing your opponents. I don’t feel the need to do that. This Broncos team is fun and charismatic. They have grown from the doldrums of a disappointing season to be flashy, free, a little cocky and a lot of fun. It’s a familiar tale. In fact, it was the journey Penrith went on from 2019 to 2020. Even our records are startlingly similar (Broncos with the slight edge, going from 13 wins, 11 losses to a grand final the next season, as opposed to Penrith’s 11 wins, 13 losses).
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