Did Ben Hunt catch you by surprise? Did you raise your eyebrows just a little bit when you heard this weekend's match against North Queensland was the 300th NRL match of his long and winding NRL career?
The 300-game mark is supposed to be a career capstone, one of the final marks in a glittering career that comes just before the end. It's an opportunity to celebrate everything a player has been and everything they have done because, unless you're from the same planet as Cameron Smith, the end is nigh.
Part of that is true for Hunt. He is one of the most seasoned players in rugby league — as all men who hit 300 games are — but in the past 12 months he has played some of the best football of his career, which is both longer than you think and showing few signs of slowing down.
Such duality has always been a part of Hunt's long journey to 300. He has been a young prodigy — Hunt was just 18 when he was named player of the year for the first Under-20s season back in 2008 — and a late bloomer given he did not become a regular NRL halfback until he'd played almost 100 NRL matches, wasn't a consistent starter at the position until his sixth year in first grade, and had arguably his best campaign at age 32 when in 2022 he finished third in the Dally M count.
Hunt made his Australian debut nine years ago but was not a certain State of Origin selection for Queensland as recently as 2021.
He is one of the best players in the world at two different positions, a consummate winner who has lost plenty of times, sometimes on the biggest stage in truly devastating fashion.
To be Ben Hunt is to perpetually be two separate, seemingly opposite things at the same time.
Perhaps that is the only way he could have survived this long in an age where playmakers are raised up and torn down so fast their heads must never stop spinning. It is a thunderdome where perfection is not expected but demanded. And when it's not delivered, there's hell to pay because for halfbacks footy isn't just about the glory of winning, it's also about who must bear the shame of losing.
Hunt has done his time in the meat grinder and taken plenty of shots, some of them deserved, some of them cheap, and each time he has risen again and kept going until he made it to where he is now.
The 2015 grand final alone, where Hunt had a night to forget even before his infamous knock-on to begin extra time, would have sent many players to a dark place from which their football would have never truly emerged again.
But there have been other hard times, like in the 2018 semifinal when he seemingly forgot the tackle count during a crucial stage of St George Illawarra's eventual 13-12 loss to South Sydney, or the couple of months in 2020 when he lost the halfback spot at the Dragons and the howling over his hefty contract was constant, vicious and deafening, or later that season when he was dropped for the State of Origin decider and missed out on playing in one of Queensland's most famous victories.
How many players never escape their failures, even as they win success along the way? How many take the big money and, like a desperate man fleeing a sinking ship with all his treasure strapped to his back, find it makes them sink to depths from which they never return?
A career can't survive on gumption alone. Hunt is a truly exhilarating attacking player, his running game is still sharp as ever, it's death to bite on his dummy and he's improved his kicking game out of sight in recent years, but his greatest gift is his ability to keep crawling through the mud and the rain until the clouds open. He never stops, even when it doesn't make sense to keep going. He's the kind of guy who'd throw rocks at the Sun for daring to set.
After Hunt scored the series-sealing try in Queensland's Origin III victory last year there were plenty who deemed it an exorcism of his previous failures, but they weren't quite right. Demons and ghosts only haunt you if you believe in them and Hunt never has.
There is no goldfish memory here — he doesn't shy away from what's happened before and he carries those memories with him — but Hunt still leads with his chin directly into what's next. If lost causes needed a new patron saint they could do a lot worse than Ben Hunt because for him no cause is ever lost — not while there's time for him to get his hands on the footy. He's never let anything break him and just about everything has tried.
What that Origin try did do was complete Hunt's greatest victory — winning the respect of a rugby league populace that had all lined up to drop the shoulder into him over the years. Now Hunt, somehow, has become one of the most popular and respected players in the league, a man they paint on walls, and the story might be far over yet.
Hunt is still an automatic selection for Queensland and Australia and is under contract with the Dragons for another two seasons, which will take him to the time he is 35 years old and, if injuries are kind, past the 350-game mark. He plays like middle age doesn't exist, like he's never going to be old, like it's just a lie they use to tame people, one he does not believe in and never will.
His future at the Dragons might not be as secure if Anthony Griffin — a huge influence on Hunt's career — is let go, a situation which looks increasingly likely as the club's record worsens. However, there would be no shortage of clubs who would pay up to get him, even at 33 with 300 games on his engine.
But there's still a job to be done before any of that can come to pass. The Dragons are 2-8 with only for and against keeping them off last place. They're outsiders against the Cowboys and probably will be in a similar position in the weeks to come.
The odds are against them and against Hunt, but that's never stopped him before. They might win this weekend and the next and the next and the next or they might continue on their current plummet down the abyss. But Hunt won't stop trying to carry them out. He doesn't know how to give up and wouldn't even if he did.
