Ronaldo Mulitalo could be forgiven for wanting to forget Cronulla's last trip to Auckland because the night before a heavy loss to the Warriors the winger tried and failed to save a woman's life.
The 44-12 thrashing was one of the low points of the Sharks' 2023 season and led to a shake-up of Craig Fitzgibbon's best 17.
But for Mulitalo the result seemed to pale into insignificance.
A day before Cronulla played at Mt Smart Stadium, Mulitalo had been watching a relative play in a local rugby union game.
As he made his way back to the team hotel, Mulitalo came across a man giving CPR on an elderly lady, who had collapsed.
"I just remember seeing this guy doing CPR on the side of the road and he looked tired so I went over and asked if he needed help," Mulitalo told AAP.
"I'd never done CPR in my life but for the next 40 minutes or so I did it until the ambulance came."
Mulitalo could feel the woman's rib-cage crack under the pressure from the compressions but it was not enough to save her life.
The winger immediately told Fitzgibbon when he returned to the Sharks' hotel but was unable to process what had happened.
"I was a bit rocked and I shed a couple of tears," Mulitalo said.
"I didn't know how to process it because it was someone random.
"I think about her family - she was a granny watching her son play in a union game.
"I sat in the shower that night with a feeling of guilt - I haven't suffered - but in that moment you want to help, it's human nature, and I was disappointed in myself.
"That night I was having dreams about it, replaying it in my head, waking up at 2am, thinking about it and going back to sleep."
Mulitalo said that the woman's death kept things in perspective as he vowed Cronulla would head to Auckland on Friday with a renewed vigour.
Some of the New Zealand international's fondest memories came at Mt Smart, which the Warriors turned into a noisy fortress last year.
"I got to go home and see my family, her family lost a loved one and that hurt," he said.
"We didn't perform to where we need to be that weekend, we got pasted, had our arses handed to us and we've got to move on and be better with this.
"I will hopefully have a clearer mind when I go into the game this week and I'm pretty excited.
"I grew up going to Mt Smart to watch SJ (Shaun Johnson) ball out and Kieran Foran and all those guys who did great things there.
"It's second nature, that's home for me, I don't see it (the noise) as a challenge or a negative, that's the exciting part."
