Where have those 25 years gone?

Scarier still I was here when they won the 1990 premiership against Penrith. If memory serves me correctly, and remembering it's been almost 30 years, I was working in the sports department that night, fledgling sports sub-editor that I was. It was exciting to be part of the grand final as something more than a spectator, feeling as though were part of the team. Or at least a team, one that was putting the paper together.

It was a different time. There was no website to worry about, but, just as there will be this time, there were extra pages to fill, everyone still wanted to know every detail, perhaps even more so as, apart from the television broadcast or the radio, there was no other way to get information about the game. You had to wait for your newspaper to hit your front lawn the morning after.

A few of us old timers are doing a little reminiscing this week. Digging out old stories and photographs, a couple of John Gearman T-shirts. Hands up if you have one of those collector items.

Brad Turner was the chief rugby league reporter that season, he covered the thrilling 1989 grand final too.

"When I started covering the Raiders in 1988 the technology choices were pretty simple," Turner says from Brisbane where he's now living.

"You would either write the story in a notepad and phone it in to whoever happened to be sitting in the sports department or, if the game ended in time to do all the interviews, you could take the more hair-raising option and use one of the company Ford Lasers to drive back and forth from Sydney and file at the office."

It was part of my job, in the early days, to take copy over the phone, as the more experienced reporters headed off to cover their sports.

"I still remember you giving me grief about verses and versus," Turner tells me. The banter is still strong.

By 1994 Turner had headed north and Bevan Hannan, who was barely a teenager at the time, was in the round. He had a knack for finding good stories, a young journalist who worked hard to earn the respect of the players and coaching staff, and his superiors back in the office.

Former chief photographer Graham Tidy covered all three premierships. He remembers catching a cab from the stadium back to the offices of the Sydney Morning Herald, where he had to process the film, make prints in the darkroom and then put them on a picture gram machine for transmission over a phone line.

"It was a long and involved process, Fitzy," he tells me.

There's only three of us left in the building who were here in 1994. Printer Bill Shortland, Peter Knight who's now in IT and me. All this talk of picture grams and acoustic couplers and landlines and copy taking and compositors and history has me feeling quite nostalgic. Anyone who doesn't recognise that landline modem dial-up noise will have no idea what I'm talking about.

Things have changed but the one thing that hasn't is the excitement of a grand final week. I came to Canberra in 1985 and took to the Raiders. I'm a Dragon's supporter, but it's hard not to love the Green Machine. I used to catch the bus out to Seiffert to watch them play. I was there the day Mal Meninga broke his arm, May 2, 1987. I can still hear the sound of him crashing into the goal post.

And who can forget the 1989 grand final? The whole town erupted as the unlikeliest of heroes, replacement Steve Jackson, reached out across the line to score the match-winning try in extra time.

But it all took on a new perspective once I came to work at The Canberra Times. I was no longer just a spectator.

Everyone thinks being a sports journalist is an easy job, after all, all we do is watch sport for a living. But there's so much more to it than that. Just like there's more to being a Canberra Raider than playing football.

Just know that both your teams, on the field, and here at the paper, will be doing their utmost to make Canberra proud.