The strangest team in the NRL, a team that is both too weird to live and too rare to die, is on familiar, unstable ground.
Riding a screaming run of madness towards a possible finals berth?
Perhaps becoming the first team ever to win 14 games but still miss out on the playoffs?
Requiring last-second tries to down sides that couldn't beat a drum then inexplicably troubling premiership heavyweights? These are the Canberra Raiders greatest hits, the ones they never get tired of playing.
Since their last premiership in 1994 it has been that way for Canberra so often that becoming a living chaos theory feels like their natural habitat. To be a Raiders fan you must have an abiding sense of tragedy which sustains you through temporary periods of joy.
So it's fitting then that the Raiders farewell Charnze Nicoll-Klokstad and Josh Hodgson on Saturday when they host Manly in the capital as they try and keep their run going. Hodgson and Nicoll-Klokstad belong to another type of Canberra team, one that only existed briefly and burned twice as bright for it.
Hodgson was there first, and his arrival was the beginning of everything that came after. He's the most transformative recruit the Raiders have ever had bar Mal Meninga and signing him was the moment the club went from living in black and white to dreaming in colour.
The Hull man become one of the best dummy halves of recent times after he arrived in Canberra, helping drive the team to their first preliminary final in two decades through his virtuosos 2016 season.
Canberra reverted to type in the up and down seasons that followed, but Hodgson's cunning and his skill remained deadly weapons and beyond that he proved the viability of filling out the roster with other Englishmen.
The Raiders will never be a self-sustaining dynasty but instead must forge their premiership dreams anew from season to season. They cannot compete with glamour clubs who carry the biggest names in the game in their pockets like so many nickels and dimes.
They have to find gold in places nobody else will dig, so getting the English pipeline was like finding the last copy of a map that showed the road to El Dorado.
Down that road they went, with Hodgson eventually leading the way as co-captain, and that's where they found Nicoll-Klokstad. He signed mere weeks before the 2019 season began and had never played an NRL game at fullback, coming from the Warriors with no guarantees.
Before long it was like he'd always been in Canberra, he'd always been chasing defenders down like they owed him money, he'd always been doing everything he possibly could to win and cursing that he couldn't do more, he'd always been one of the best fullbacks in the league and it was only now that we all woke up to it.
Then everything started for Canberra, those heady days that already seem so far away even as they're fresh in our minds. It was just a moment ago, it must have been, because we remember it so well.
The green faithful dreamed about this for so long after the golden era ended way back in 1994, it had been a lifetime for some, it cannot already be over and done with and locked in a past to which we can never return. It cannot be time to move on and start again. It is too soon.
Are we that far removed from the day a half-blind Joey Leilua flicked that pass to John Bateman for Canberra to beat Melbourne on the road in the finals?
Has it been so long since the preliminary final, where Hodgson played one of the best games of his life before Josh Papalii crashed over to secure victory over South Sydney, and can it really be almost three years since Nicoll-Klokstad left every part of himself on the field in the grand final loss to the Roosters?
They'll be back, that's what everyone says after a team has lost a grand final. This is just the start. The players are still young and hungry, and they'll fight even harder for having come so close. These guys will be back here one day. These are the things we tell ourselves. We might even believe it, despite knowing in our hearts it isn't true.
Time passes. Heroes get old. People say goodbye. One day the last new song you liked will have come out a long time ago and nobody but you will play it anymore.
Every team from every season only exists for 12 months at a time and then they are never together again, not in the same way, no matter how much their fans love them or how much they love each other. Life gets in the way, and the names and faces change until one day you look around and everything's different, what came before is just a memory and the dream either changes or fades away.
Leilua was the first to go, then halfback Aidan Sezer. Canberra made the preliminary final the next season but after that they lost John Bateman, the man who, along with Nicoll-Klokstad, gave the team the iron will they rode so close to glory the year before.
In hindsight, whatever special thing the Raiders found in 2019 and 2020 left with Bateman, and Hodgson and Nicoll-Klokstad will take most of what's left when they hit the road. The trademarks of that side – a furious defensive resolve, an unbreakable fighting spirit, an endless intensity and an unorthodox skill that manifested itself in a predilection for one-on-one steals, of which Hodgson was the master – aren't there anymore.
The Raiders still have plenty of guys who were there in 2019 - including Josh Papalii and Jack Wighton, two of the club's best ever players - and there's still a lot of talent in Canberra. They might well make the finals this year and that would really be something, but they are back in the same old pit of madness whence they came.
With Hodgson and Nicoll-Klokstad missing plenty of football over the past two seasons, the regression for the Raiders has been clear. They're back from being close to great to close to good, and they are a little less like they used to be and a little more like they've always been.
There's no going back for Canberra. Hodgson is turning 33 in October and his knees are killing him. Nicoll-Klokstad wasn't going home for reasons that are more important than football.
Even if they stayed, things could never be the same. In recent years, Hodgson has not been the player he was. Nicoll-Klokstad has paid the price for his all-action style and struggled with injury.
Time has passed. Change has come. Once some bridges are crossed there's no way back to where you were before. The light on the porch has flickered off for good and the howling of hungry wolves rises through the night.
Hodgson has been sidelined for so long it feels like many Raiders fans have already made their peace with it. His farewell season was ended after less than 15 minutes when his knee packed it in yet again in the season opener against the Sharks.
It would have been easy for Hodgson to angle for an early release to Parramatta, leave Canberra behind and get a head start on the rest of his life. He did not, because he never wanted to leave in the first place. Most players of Hodgson's quality had to be convinced to come to Canberra and convinced further to stay, but Hodgson would have kept playing there forever if he could.
Nicoll-Klokstad's last game in the firsts was just as ignominious as Hodgson's – he came off the bench for five minutes in a loss to the Dragons on a night when Wollongong was closer to the bottom of the sea than a football ground.
In his last time at Bruce Stadium before he joins the Warriors, Nicoll-Klokstad will play reserve grade on Saturday and there will be more players on the field than fans in the stands once the game kicks off at 11:00am. It's a far cry from the stages he has known.
It would be easy for Nicoll-Klokstad go through the motions and drag his feet in petulance at this demotion. He will not, because he does not know how. If defeat is in the air, he is the kind of player who simply decides to stop breathing and keep going anyway.
It is no fitting end for either man, not after all they have done. But it's not how they'll be remembered and it's not what will come to mind when they return next year to a heroes welcome even as they wear different colours.
Their greatest deeds as Raiders belong to the past now. The ink is dry and the book is closed, and all the things they did now exist in photographs we have taken so we will remember these days when we're old, so we can live it again as we stare at the past with our fading eyes.
