As the many Brisbane fans in your life may have told you, and there always seems to be more of them around when the Broncos are winning, there's a bit of a 2006 vibe around.
Even a full 15 years after their last premiership, the Broncos are still one of the biggest teams around. Their wins and their losses, their highs and their lows are louder and faster and more extreme than anybody else's because nobody else has a city like Brisbane all to themselves.
So even though Brisbane were in a preliminary final as recently as 2017, and only missed the finals twice during their descent under Anthony Seibold, it feels like they were away for longer, and — having now returned to the land of the living — they have risen from greater depths.
With Melbourne on the ropes due to a serious injury toll, there's a spot open in the top four, and Brisbane will have it in their sights with an eye on starting a serious run with Thursday night's clash against Parramatta.
Make the top four and everything is possible. Make the top four and your dreams come true. But what is that dream, precisely? Just how high should Brisbane be looking to climb?
The snappy answer is to say they're looking to go all the way, just like they did back in the Wayne Bennett days when Allan Langer was running the show, Brisbane were the most powerful club in the world and there were so many premierships they lost track of them all. God, don't you just miss the 1990s?
A heavy Origin representation was supposed to knock them off the horse, but instead unheralded players like Delouise Hoeter, Jordan Pereira and Zac Hosking have gone from being guys who were just filling out the roster to loyal sons of the Kevolution who have kept the dream alive. A classic Brisbane campaign needs to have a couple of baby Broncos efforts, and in the last two weeks that's exactly what the Queenslanders have got.
But for Brisbane fans to start dreaming of another premiership, their side must find one last gear. The Broncos have risen back to premiership relevance by beating all the teams below them on the ladder, and that's not meant as an insult because that's exactly what a team needs to do to make the finals. Of their 11 wins, only one has come against the current top four.
Most of those wins, especially their recent victories, are better than they look on paper. The last time they had something resembling their top side on the field was back in the Magic Round, but their only losses in the past three months have come against Melbourne and North Queensland and they were not disgraced in either defeat.
But that's not the same as winning, and Brisbane are trying with all their might to leave the honour of a gallant loss behind. They need to take down somebody dangerous and hang their head over the fireplace if they're to hit the next level. And while the Eels are below them on the ladder, they have enough stars to make people take a bit more notice.
For Parramatta's part, there is no such doubt about their ability to swim in deep waters. A team doesn't beat Melbourne in Melbourne when the Storm are fully loaded and they don't hand Penrith their only loss of the season to date if they're not quality.
It's easy to claim the Eels need to find consistency in order to break their premiership drought, and Brad Arthur has been asked words to that effect a dozen times over in recent years, but that's not quite right.
Parramatta don't need to crush each and every team they face, like Penrith do, in order to win the title. They just need to do it three times or four times in a row when it counts.
That's what makes them different to Brisbane, who have climbed the ladder by focusing on what is right in front of them. The Eels know they have extra gears, maybe gears the Broncos can't match, but they can't always find their way to that place.
Being a team like that, which relies on a switch flipping when the moment is right, is a perilous way to live because there's always a danger the power is out when that switch is flipped in a time of desperate need.
But we can't know if that will happen until later in the year, so the challenge for the Eels isn't rising to the highest level, it's navigating the tides between those big occasions. Their last two wins, over the Tigers and Warriors, were perfunctory, business like, a good exercise but nothing too taxing. You sense that they sensed the bigger games were to come.
Those bigger games are here, they are upon the Eels, and it is time to really go to work. If there is a switch, it must be flicked here and now. Aside from a meeting with Canterbury in Round 23, each of Parramatta's opponents to the end of the regular season are currently in the top eight.
Conventional wisdom says the Eels do better against top-line opposition when the stakes are high, which must be a good thing because they're about to get a whole lot of that right in their faces. They'll be walking through hell, but that's an easy way to catch fire.
By the time we get to the finals, the Eels could be ensconced in the top four or hanging onto the bottom of the eight for dear life or somewhere in between, but we'll know exactly how good they are, exactly what they're capable of and whether this game against the Broncos will be part of the history of their fifth premiership or just another game lost in the long drought from 1986 to today.
Neither team's premiership life will be on the line on Thursday night. We're still too early in the run to the finals for any game to be the end, but the flip side to that is we're close enough for a game like this to be the start, the 80 minutes we will all look back on in the future and say that was the day the premiership charge truly began.
