Here's the way it was supposed to go — Parramatta was meant to really stick it to Penrith, knock them around, rattle their cage, rub a bit of dirt on them.
The Eels were meant to either knock off the Panthers for the third time this year or come close enough to have everybody think that they were the team that could challenge the minor premiers' quest to go back to back.
It went that way for about 45 minutes. The Eels, who have become a popular premiership pick in recent weeks, went blow-for-blow with the Panthers.
The footy was fast and physical, hard and unyielding, the kind of game where the cream would undoubtedly rise to the top when it mattered.
The Eels were right in it, until they weren't anymore.
It didn't take long — there was a cloud of dust, some roars in the night, a bit of blood on the pitch and then the game was gone, Penrith was winning 27-8 and Parramatta was left wondering how the hell it happened.
It was so close, until it wasn't.
Finals football is the fiery crucible in which the true nature of a team is revealed. All the bluster of the regular season doesn't fly when your season is on the line.
You are what you are, and the lights are bright enough that everyone can see it.
After three seasons at the top, with one premiership to their names and looking like good things for a second, we know exactly who Penrith are, exactly what they're about and exactly how they win games at this time of year.
They play to their strengths, which is their physicality in defence, the athleticism of their carries in attack and Nathan Cleary's kicking game.
They know that if they do those things well enough for long enough, the other team will break before they do and they have absolute confidence in their methods and their madness after it won them the premiership last year.
Like he was in that decider, Cleary was the best player on the field.
His kicking game was dynamite all night, be it clearing kicks, attacking grubbers or those wild, untameable corkscrew bombs that make you wince as much as any big hit.
Waqa Blake will be seeing those bombs in his nightmares after the Eels flyer dropped four of them.
That's the other thing about the Panthers — once they sense a weakness, they'll attack. They lock their jaws onto it and won't let go until their prey has stopped moving.
The Eels can play that way for a while, and they did.
Their forwards are just as bad and mean as Penrith's.
Nobody in the league strikes the ball as sweetly as Cleary, but Mitchell Moses comes close.
They can run and tackle with malicious intent. All the ingredients are there.
But, they can't do it for as long as Penrith.
If that sounds like a simple way of putting it, that's because rugby league is a simple game and the Panthers play it a simple way.
Why make it complicated when it doesn't have to be and it's worked so many times before?
Expect more of the same when the Panthers play in the preliminary final in two weeks' time.
They don't have to change, because nobody has found a solution for their particular style of rugby league brutalism.
For Parramatta, the path forward is clear and mysterious at the same time.
This is the fourth year in a row they've made the second week of the finals. The last three years, they've been bounced. This has been their final frontier for a while now.
They have everything they need to go a step further. They looked Penrith in the eye for quite some time before they blinked.
But blink they did, as they always seem to when it really, really matters.
In the final seconds of the game, Parramatta was on the attack. Maika Sivo had a shot at the line after a shift and went hard for the corner, as he is wont to do.
He was swarmed by black jerseys, attacked by them, beset by a claw of Panthers.
They came from everywhere and they hit him and hit him hard, twisting and fighting to keep him out of the in-goal.
The game was over. It didn't really matter. But they did keep him out, because it did matter.
There's a lesson in there somewhere, but unless they win next week and progress to their first preliminary final since 2009, it's one the Eels can't quite learn.
