In the halls of Valhalla, omens were never to be ignored.
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So this year, in mourning the loss of Quentin Pongia, one of the Raiders' favourite sons from the 1994 grand final year, there will be those in the club aware of how strangely similar this awful loss has aligned with another from yesterday.
David "Nana" Grant was the Raiders' inaugural captain and prop in 1982.
Grant, originally from Dubbo and a cousin of Arthur Beetson, played for three clubs - the Rabbitohs, Roosters and Tigers - before joining the newly-promoted Canberra team.
Grant was a Raiders clubman through and through, tough as nails, and always led from the front.
In 1994, at just 38 years old, the big man died of a heart attack. The Raiders went on to win the championship.
This year, Pongia, another prop and described by coach Ricky Stuart as the "toughest individual that I ever played with" died after a battle with cancer.
Former Raiders media manager Bevan Hannan remembers Pongia well.
"Quentin was recruited out of New Zealand, a little town over there, and his family had never seen him play live for the Raiders until the '94 grand final," Hannan said.
"Like David Grant, Quentin was a classic, shoulder-to-the-wheel type of player, as good props always are. Both were hard blokes and great Raiders team men."
Hannan made the connection - as many will - and while he doesn't believe in omens, there are curious portents about the Raiders' tilt at the title this year which dovetail with 25 years ago.
Hannan is in a perfect position to reflect on that halcyon title-winning year.
As fresh-faced young cadet who joined The Canberra Times at 19, Hannan was given the coveted job of the paper's rugby league writer after the incumbent writer from the previous three years, Kevin Hepworth, accepted a job in Hong Kong.
The Canberra Times will be at the grand final again on Sunday night, but this time they'll have the help of laptops and the internet.
The last trip in 1994 was a very different time for a very different city.
Gungahlin had fewer than 500 people, Paul Keating was our imperious prime minister, and Blue Heelers was just starting on TV.
Our Raiders-supporting sports minister Ros Kelly was in big trouble over her infamous sports rorts affair, Priscilla Queen of the Desert was huge but somewhat controversial cinema hit, and you could buy a Hyundai Excel for $13,990 "drive away no more to pay".
Dame Edna Everidge was touring Canberra with a stage show (again), unemployment was at 10.5 per cent, Nirvana front man Kurt Cobain committed suicide, and Nelson Mandela was sworn in as South Africa's president.
It was an equally tumultuous year for a 23-year-old Bevan Hannan, thrust into a top sports writer role for which he said he had been "preparing for years but became pretty intense very quickly".
The way in which the media and the players interacted 25 years ago was also very different.
"There were very few night games back then, the TV coverage was patchy, there was no Foxtel saturation, and the Raiders were the biggest show in town; they were like rock stars," he said.
"There was no cattle call press conference after the games back then, you just hit the change rooms and asked all the questions.
"The coach at the time, Tim Sheens, was very generous with his time, as were most of the players."
After a frantic grand final coverage in which a light plane was chartered to get the paper's writing and photographic team up for the 3pm grand final kick-off, and back to file for the paper the next day, Bevan Hannan then jumped on a plane to the UK a few days later to cover the Kangaroos tour.
Kevin Hepworth was The Canberra Times' rugby league writer during the turbulent years when the Raiders were found to be in breach of the salary cap in 1990-91 and lost a number of key players including Glenn Lazarus and David Barnhill.
He said that the future looked very shaky for the back-to-back champions because the contracts for all their star players had hefty back-ended bonuses.
One of the survival master-strokes by the club, as he recalled, was putting Reserve Bank governor Bernie Fraser in charge of the Raiders' fund-raising. High-powered local business leaders quickly jumped on board.
"For a city the size of Canberra, the amount of clout carried by the support network was pretty damn impressive," Hepworth said.
Bevan Hannan, who is on a family holiday in the UK but will be watching the game intently and online from somewhere out on the Salisbury Plain - "I've got it worked out; I will have coverage" - believes the Raiders have "reinvented themselves" in recent years and in doing so, have won back the hearts of the Canberra public.
"I think there were some years when the Raiders lost that important connection with the Canberra community; they still had a rusted-on supporter base but the wider appeal wasn't there," he said.
"But in the past few seasons, it's really turned around. And that's to the absolute credit of the players, the coaching staff and the administration.
"They've recruited well, and Ricky [Stuart] has put steel into their defence. There's a fair dinkum great culture around the club now. People recognise it and want to be part of it."