For me the Dragons' season to date came down to their game on Friday night.
While I've been riding high on their performances so far, I saw the game against the Storm as a real litmus test of how we were actually travelling.
We were up against the Storm, a team we'd beaten just five times since the merger in 1999. And two of those five wins were in 1999, which means we'd beaten them just three times in the last nine years.
Read more Try Hard blogs Full coverage of The St George Illawarra DragonsOn top of that, we'd only won one of the last 10 matches - and that was when the Storm were missing almost their entire first grade team because of Origin.
Plus, there's the memories of the 1999 grand final and the embarrassment of the 70-10 flogging a year later. Those would weigh more heavily on my mind as a fan rather than the current crop of players, given that none of them were in the team back in 2000.
And still from that fan's perspective, there's the fact that I hate the Storm. With a passion. For me, the Storm are the Darth Vader of the NRL. And not the redeemed nice guy Darth from Return of the Jedi, I'm talking about the evil Darth from Star Wars, the one who chokes people for fun.
And like the scary Darth Vader, they inspire both loathing and fear. Perhaps not as much as in previous seasons but still enough to worry about.
That worry combined with the shocking losing record is why I saw this as an important game for the Dragons - win and it proves we're the real deal. Lose and it suggests that we might not have the mental toughness to overcome a team of choking Darth Vaders and are perhaps not as good as I thought we were.
So I'm pretty stoked with the performance on Friday night - and not just because we beat a team I hate with every fibre of my being. It was also because we beat a team that had the psychological wood on us for a lot of years.
In the game, the team didn't look quite on song in the first half but only went into the sheds at the break down 12-8.
But the Dragons lifted in the second half, racking up 18 points while keeping the Storm scoreless. And the Storm are no slouches either - they've got the second-best defence in the competition. You don't score 18 unanswered points against them unless you're doing something right.
Something else I took out of the game was Jamie Soward's response to an injured shin in the second half (something which got overlooked in all the hooha about his tackle on Greg "Strangler" Inglis). When he started limping after putting up a bomb, I saw our finals chances fading away.
Then he hobbled over towards the sideline, perhaps looking to be taken off the field. But Wendell - the biggest Soward supporter there is - told him to get back into the line where he belonged.
And Soward listened and took his place in the defensive line. Later he would go on to orchestrate a few more tries for us. It showed us - and perhaps even the man himself - that Soward is a lot tougher and more resilient than some of us might have thought.
His actions were a perfect example of how much tougher and harder the Dragons of 2009 are.
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