Raiders success gives Canberra a pulse

That might be a declaration that is ever so slightly cringe-inducing looking back at it 30 years later.

Canberra's soul has certainly been shaped by more than a football grand final, but it does go some way to explaining how integral sport, and the Canberra Raiders, are to the psyche and spirit of Canberra.

It was also a sign of a city that, to this day, remains eager to claim a space and to create things that are distinctively its own.

Creating things that embody Canberra has not always been easy in a city that is notorious for its transient population.

People come and go from Canberra, and that makes it challenging to establish anything as distinctly Canberran.

Canberra is so often in the national spotlight, but that attention is almost always focused on something related to federal politics. That news is not about Canberra; rather, it is about the mob up on the hill.

Many of Canberra's national institutions are not exclusively ours either but shared with the rest of the country. The National Museum, the Australian War Memorial, the National Library. They are in Canberra, but they belong to all Australians.

"Our" AFL team isn't even from Canberra. It's from Western Sydney.

But the Raiders are ours. They are Canberran.

Canberra loves a bandwagon, and we love to intensely embrace something that we can genuinely claim to be our own.

And so, we do things that can seem garish in response to their team making the grand final; we make green sausages, green bread and drink green milk. We turn Black Mountain Tower green. We bleed green.

We leap on the chance to have an outlet to express our Canberraness.

In the same way that the symbol of Canberra's centenary will always remain the Skywhale, we adopt those things we can call our own, even with a level of self-awareness that ultimately they are just a little bit weird.

Because to some degree, they appropriately sum up some of what it means to call Canberra home.

It's a planned city, designed by a couple from Chicago, intended to serve as the seat of government. The lives and livelihoods of the people who find themselves in Canberra were a secondary consideration.

So in the late '80s and early '90s, the surging Canberra Raiders were a phenomenon around which Canberra could bond.

In less than a decade, Canberra went from being a sporting pariah in a country obsessed with sport, to home to one of Australia's most dominant sporting teams.

Growing up in Canberra in the early '90s, it was impossible not to become indoctrinated as a die-hard fan of the Raiders. Meninga, Stuart, Daley, Mullins, Belcher, Wiki. Veritable gods to a child growing up in Canberra in the 1990s.

It has not been easy at times to be a Raiders fan. The Raiders spent most of the 2000s in the wilderness, and the early 2010s delivered a flurry of talented, but ill-disciplined, upstarts that we were ultimately better off jettisoning.

It's also physically tough. You often find yourself questioning your judgement when you have trudged out to Bruce on a zero-degree night just to watch the team get rolled.

These experiences partly explain why the tension was so thick in the air at a sold-out Canberra Stadium, if not the whole of Canberra, last Friday night.

That tension was shattered when Josh Papalii charged over for the winner, and the crowd erupted with the realisation Canberra is headed to its first grand final in a quarter of a century.

Canberra had another chance to celebrate something that is just ours.

I'll be there in Sydney on Sunday night, cheering on a team that is inexorably linked to my childhood and to the city I consider home. I'm sure I'll be joined by thousands of others for who that is true too.

Go the Raiders