The greatest day of the year – without question – is grand final day and if you don't agree, well, we cannot be friends.

The first grand final I attended was the 1991 decider between Penrith and Canberra at the Sydney Football Stadium and it changed my life forever.

There is a photo in one of our family's old photo albums of me standing outside the Olympic Hotel on Moore Park Road, flanked by both parents, drinking beer from a plastic cup.

I was 16. It was 11am. I had a grin from ear to ear and I still can't recall a time when I was ever so happy.

Then we entered the stadium. Tina Turner and Jimmy Barnes sung Simply the Best as part of the pre-match entertainment. Up there, just above on the second tier, was Prime Minister Bob Hawke.

I swear Panthers forward Mark Geyer looked straight at me when tears welled in his eyes after he was sin-binned in the second half.

And then, as the sun set on the afternoon and those big shadows from the SFS roof stretched across the turf, Royce Simmons scored the second of two tries in his final match.

Penrith had won their first premiership.

As I walked up through the stands on the way out, I found myself standing outside the press box. One glance at the dishevelled bunch of reporters on the other side of the glass and I knew that's where I belonged.

That's why you cover the game: for Royce Simmons and Mark Geyer and all the other wonderful twists and turns and romance and emotion from that decider.

You don't cover it for the sinuendo that has rocked rugby league more than ever this season.

When Roosters halfback Mitchell Pearce was exposed on A Current Affair having drunken simulated sex with a poodle cross – I still shake my head each time I type this – the game's powerbrokers thought that would be the end of it.

Since then, the off-field melodrama has degenerated into a blur of match-fixing investigations, salary cap shenanigans, players consorting with bikies and brothel owners and being pinged for drug possession, sex tapes leaked through social media and whatever Sharks bad boy Andrew Fifita might do next.

Thank God for the footy?

Those with a plastic-beer-cup-half-empty mindset will see this grand final at ANZ Stadium on Sunday night as the club caught drug cheating, up against the club caught salary cap cheating and which has ruined the game with Roman-Greco wrestling techniques.

But there is more to it when Cronulla and Melbourne rip and tear in this decider. Should the Sharks win their first premiership, in their 50th season, it will finally make redundant the most famous line uttered by a coach in history.

"Waiting for Cronulla to win the premiership is like leaving the porch light on for Harold Holt," said Jack Gibson after three frustrating years in the mid-1980s.

If the Storm triumph, it will establish coach Craig Bellamy and captain Cameron Smith among the all-time greats, if they are not there already.

This is what's at stake on grand final day, the greatest day of the year.