After each touchdown at a game in Los Angeles a buzzer would screech, sending the crowd into a frenzy. Stuart turned to Jason Mathie, the Raiders' commercial and marketing manager, who was sitting next to him, and whacked him.

"He said, 'we've got to have something like that at our game every time we score a try'," Mathie laughs.

Mathie took hundreds of pages of notes from that study trip four years ago including about the buzzer at the college game.

In his notepad there was also a review of the flag-raising ceremony conducted by the Seattle Seahawks before each of their matches, a nod to a former club legend or VIP who acts as the NFL team's 12th man at every home game. Another section was devoted to the learnings from autograph alley at the Seahawks, where every child membership includes an inner-sanctum experience with the players once a season. The Raiders used to have barely 100 junior members. They increased it to more than 850 in one year after picking up on the concept.

It was also in the bleachers of American stadiums during that trip, undertaken by Stuart, Mathie, Raiders chief executive Don Furner and then football manager John Bonasera, that Canberra's now iconic Viking clap had its origins. It was a year before the Iceland soccer team's ritual lit up the European Championships in 2016.

"We took hundreds of pages of notes and components," Mathie says. "The whole cogs started to turn for us. We came home and thought we've definitely got to do a better job of telling how community committed we are about the good things we do. I said we need to develop something that's iconic for the club."

Which is where the Viking clap comes in.

As the giant horn which is sounded to start the routine - built from fibreglass by the father of the club's media manager Ben Pollack, and Raiders legend Frank Roddy - was trucked up the Hume Highway to Sydney this week, Canberra officials reflected on where that tour in 2015 has led the club.

"The biggest thing [the Viking clap] has done for our business is it has given us a different demographic of people coming to games," Mathie says. "We notice it not just in the number but there's more females coming to our games and there's more youth. That's mums with kids.

"It's had a significant effect on our membership which was aging. Pre-2015 a typical Raiders fan was 49 years of age and male. There was about 73 per cent male fans and 27 per cent female. It's probably closer now to 34 per cent female and the average [age] is down to low 40s."

Says co-captain Jarrod Croker: "I didn't know anything about it [beforehand]. We didn't know how it would go and there wasn't really a build-up. When it came out I just got chills. I thought, 'how good is this?' It was unreal."

So much so Canberra fans have started performing it after games as well as before them, as they will prior to Sunday's NRL grand final at ANZ Stadium.

In the thick of it is super fan Simon Tayoun, a Lebanese-Australian who lives in western Sydney and takes a booming drum signed by all the players to nearly every Raiders match throughout the country and in New Zealand.

The boilermaker knew nothing about rugby league when he arrived in Australia in the late 1980s, but watched a game at Redfern Oval between South Sydney, who his brother-in-law supported, and Canberra. He met the Raiders players after the match and was hooked.

One of his sons had intended to get married on the October long weekend, but said to his father last year he would set the date a week later in case the Raiders made the grand final.

"I don't look at the cost [of travelling], I just look at how happy I am," Tayoun said. "I've been married for 33 years and my wife says, 'go and do it because it makes you happy'. But when there's no football it's her time. That's the deal. Happy wife, happy life.

"I saw [Raiders prop] Sia [Soliola] and I said to him, 'if we win, please come to me and we'll do the drum [after the game]'. It's great for the people and the kids. They love it. You see the kids on their faces how happy they are."