That Unfamiliar Feeling

This guy goes alright

As I write this I am sitting on Jetstar flight 513 to Melbourne as I prepare to watch my beloved Rabbitohs compete in the finals. I’m also visiting my sister and her new puppy, but you don’t care about that. This experience is certainly unfamiliar to me and most Rabbitohs fans under the age of 35 or so. Sure everyone knows that the Rabbitohs haven’t won the Grand Final since 1971 and that we have only even competed in one finals match since 1989, but some people don’t realise that the Rabbitohs haven’t won a finals match in my 27 years on this earth.

Now obviously there is no guarantee at all that we will see a victory in 2012, but with a guaranteed double chance, the second of which is a home game, I would like to believe there is a pretty decent chance you will see the Rabbitohs in the preliminary final in two weeks time. A friend of mine (a Roosters fan no less) already texted me suggesting we are already only one win away from a grand final, as he sees it as being nigh on impossible for us to lose both of our next two games. I wish I had his confidence.

Sure I do think we are a good chance to qualify, but there is also a chance we repeat the efforts of 1989 with back to back losses leading to elimination and fans wondering what happened. Hopefully no current Rabbitoh ends up being remembered as the 2012 Steve Mavin.

As I wrote previously, I still am conditioned to be pessimistic about the Rabbitohs, even as we are firmly entrenched into this new era of professionalism under Michael Maguire. Then again, if I thought we were certainly going to lose on Saturday, I wouldn’t be on a plane to Melbourne right now (that may be a lie; after all I’m still visiting my sister).

Anyway, the feeling it seems that I and other Rabbitohs fans have right now is one of excitement, but also restlessness. There is the old saying “Act like you’ve been there before”, but the problem is we haven’t been there before and thus we are acting accordingly. The whole concept of having to wait and find out when our game is so we can book finals tickets and flights etc was completely foreign to myself and my other Rabbitohs fan friends. Within a few minutes of the game being announced, I had three texts from friends about flights and tickets and when we were heading down etc. We’re like kids in a candy store, only if the kids had been driving past the candy store every day without going inside, only now are we allowed to go in and buy a lolly. We just hope that lolly tastes like victory and that the players are better than we are at acting like they’ve been there before.

Glory Glory fellow Rabbitohs. Enjoy your lolly.