Colin Love, Australian rugby league players and some blokes selling UHF aerials in Suva.
They are a few of the notable winners from the Rugby League World Cup.
ARL chairman Love, who was criticised for negotiating a $300,000 fee to run the tournament, led a round of backpatting on Thursday, leading in to tonight's final between Australia and New Zealand in Brisbane.
Among the achievements of the tournament was a projected $5million profit, money which Love said would be directed at game development in league outposts such as Fiji. A slice will go towards Aussie players if they win tonight, reportedly $30,000 per man.
The profitable tournament follows the disaster of the last World Cup in 2000, which lost $2million. This event has given Love and others in the Rugby League International Federation reason to be bullish about the code's future.
Love told The Canberra Times the Cup's success would ensure another tournament would be held in five years' time.
''The response we've had from different areas of the public have all been that the tournament has been a celebration of rugby league,'' Love said.
''There's been a tough market in a tough economic time, yet we still averaged around 15,000 people to each game. The final is a sell out, and the interest overall has been enormous. We couldn't be happier.''
Of the statistics released by the RLIF on Thursday, many were impressive. The Kangaroos jersey will finish the year the highest selling national jersey, the crowd average was 14,300.
Apparently the supply of UHF aerials in Fiji ran out to satisfy the demand of a 500,000-strong cumulative audience over the tournament.
Some statistics though had questionable relevance. For example 718,000 people from 161 countries were said to have visited the RLWC08 website, or 82 per cent of the 194 countries in the world. It would be interesting to know how many league followers hooked up to the web in Turkmenistan or Grenada or Burkina Faso and what they say about the game's global strength.
While much of the success of the tournament has been tied to its overseas audience, the profits look more modest when zooming in on the strong rugby league market of Canberra.
Of the four 8.30pm games involving Australia shown here on WIN, two won their timeslots while two were convincingly beaten.
The tournament opener against New Zealand easily won its slot, but ABC movies Gideon's Daughter and Friends & Crocodiles easily outgunned the next two Aussie games against England and Papua New Guinea.
The semi-final against Fiji a hopeless mismatch returned to the timeslot winner's list, but viewers were subjected to an at-times patronising commentary. Phil Gould booing the Australians for not letting Fiji score consolation tries took match-calling to a weird extreme.
Out at Canberra Stadium, the game between Scotland and France drew a fair crowd of 9827. But it should be noted a very significant number of those tickets were give-aways. In November last year, when tickets first went on sale, stadium chief executive Neale Guthrie said the attendance target was between 12,000-15,000.
This week Guthrie said the Canberra leg of the tournament was a success.
''Certainly the two teams that visited were well received. The crowd got into it and people adopted their two teams, plenty wore kilts or had their faces painted in the respective colours,'' Guthrie said.
''The crowd of about 10,000 was sufficient I think. I know the ARL were happy with the outcome of the match.''
Canberra Raiders fans have had more reason to watch Australia's performance than they might have expected through the inclusion of Joel Monaghan and, briefly, Terry Campese.
Raiders chief executive Don Furner described the tournament as a qualified success, given the obstacles of timing and the overwhelming superiority of the home team.
''At the end of the footy season people lose interest in footy and start thinking of summer sports, so the space they did get in the media was pretty good,'' Furner said.
''We're thinking of Christmas and we've got a World Cup final on and you're asking people to hold their interest for rugby league. It's not an easy gig, so I think they've done a pretty good job.''
At the end of four weeks and 18 matches, the big question is, as it was at the start of the tournament, does a Rugby League World Cup stack up?
Is an Australian romp to another title (it has won the last six tournaments dating back to 1975, and nine of 12 all up), a ''world'' made up of far-western Europe and a section of the Pacific, sufficient reason to stage it again?
Furner thinks so.
''People might say 'what's the point', but you do have to try to promote the sport in those countries,'' Furner said.
''What you hope for is some upsets. That's what you really do need for the viability of it internationally. Unfortunately the only thing that goes against it is that Australia is too good.''
Love has repeatedly compared his tournament to the Rugby Union World Cup as it was in 1987.
Again on Thursday he reminded the media that a semi-final of that tournament was played at Concord Oval in western Sydney in front of 17,768 fans.
He did not acknowledge though that at the time of that tournament, rugby was amateur with none of the commercial might backing the 2008 league World Cup. Rugby, even at that time, had a global footprint enormously larger than league.
Love's prediction that league can ''head in that direction hopefully in a much shorter period of time'' may be wishful thinking.
Still, he and others in rugby league are marching on to 2013, energised by the spirited showing of the likes of Fiji and Ireland. RLIF is confident an annual Four Nations competition will keep a global pulse beating.
And Love says the knockers can just keep knocking.
''People criticise if you don't do something. When you do it, they still criticise you,'' Love said.
''Our aim was to ensure it didn't make a loss, like the 2000 one. We achieved that in a big way. Our other aim was that the tournament created great exposure to the game internationally. It's done both.''