Remember that old Bill Shankly quote about football being far more than a matter of life and death? It's fun to say, it reminds us of just how much these games mean, and why we waste hours and hours of our weeks watching, reading about or thinking about them.
It is, of course, also partly tongue-in-cheek. And on a night like this you could be forgiven for dismissing such an idea as complete nonsense. You see Jai Arrow, his condition deteriorating, everything being slowly taken from him, and it does make you wonder what the point of any of this is, if something so awful can happen to someone for no reason.
But the lesson is that it's not that this stuff, which is for all intents and purposes a leisure activity, is more or less important. It's that sports and life and death aren't things that we need to think about as being independent of one another. They're inseparably, intrinsically linked.
Death and pain and suffering and loss are horrible experiences, but it's the things that cause us grief that allow us to truly embrace the things that make us great. And ignoring everything else about Motor Neurone Disease and ignoring the pocket of snarky people who had a problem with Arrow playing these final two matches, this was truly great. A port in a storm of what will continue to be a long and hard road for a champion player, as well as his friends and family.
Thankfully, we left the banality of people being upset about Arrow's chance to reach 100 games in the discourse leading up to game 99, when the scenes of Arrow being unable to even dress himself or put his boots on were probably enough to make those people realise that the sanctity of the sport, whatever that means, really didn't matter all that much when juxtaposed with what was happening in front of them, and what we saw again last night.
This isn't anyone wheeling out a sick man for performative reasons. This isn't a horrible disease being used as a prop for altruism. Anyone who was there last week on the Gold Coast or last night in Sydney can see how much all of this meant to him. Arrow has done brilliantly to make the best of this situation at every turn, including a mocking dismissal of substitute Cam Murray at the start of last week's win over the Titans. He's handled this awful situation as well as a person possibly can, and deserves everything and anything we can give him.
It's funny how things work out. For all the talk of wild card rounds, mass restings, games having no stakes in the final round of the season and potential remedies to these issues, it ended up being for the best, as something more important than any two competition points took centre stage.
If Souths had lost last week and the Sharks had won, the Roosters would be full-strength and the Rabbitohs would need to beat their arch-rivals to make the finals - the reverse of what happened in the final round last year. In a way, the low stakes of this match and the team the Roosters put on the field meant that this really was all about Jai Arrow.
Arrow, of course, would not have wanted his own story to distract from a potential play-in game for Souths, even if nobody but the very worst of our society would have seen it that way. But instead, much like the Alex Johnston game earlier this year, the atmosphere was about as far from 'Book of Feuds' as you could get. The crowd rose as one when bench player Cody Walker came to the sideline, and special interchange official Wayne Bennett stood with card in hand. Each man embraced Arrow, who received the loudest cheer of the night, and perhaps any night at that stadium.
The game itself meandered on. Souths scored 50 points without looking particularly good, the young Roosters looked game despite losing by 30. None of that mattered.
On Friday, Arrow was the storyline. He was more important than the result - and would have been even if it was a grand final. But he IS sports, and the way that people around not just the NRL but the Australian and even international sporting communities have rallied around him, is life.