It's the question many were asking the first time Rabbitohs star Damien Cook first experienced the roller coaster of NRL grand final week.

Those seven days in 2014 are certainly a far cry from his second taste of it this week as a Rabbitohs, NSW and Australian Test star.

This time in 2014 though, Cook was a Bulldogs' reserve grader with four NRL games to his name when Michael Ennis suffered a broken foot in the Dogs prelim final win over Penrith.

Given Ennis had played in all 27 games that season, and typically the full 80 minutes, next to no thought had been given to his back-up.

His untimely injury sent people scrambling for NSW Cup programs to find Cook, who was topping up his meagre footy pay packet with shifts pulling beers at Helensburgh Tradies.

Des Hasler ultimately opted for Moses Mbye at dummy-half though, as is his way, he kept his cards close to his chest on it through the week.

It's a call that seems strange today, but Cook says it made sense back then.

"I remember back to that grand final week when Mick got injured and lot of people thought I was going to be playing," Cook said.

"I sort of knew I wouldn't. Moses had played a lot of footy that year in the first grade squad, I'd only played two games and one of them for only a few minutes.

"Not that I wouldn't have gone out there and done my best but, as a coach, I understand why Des put him in that situation. It was definitely the right choice."

Ironically, he went through a similar experience a year later when he was largely unsighted until Ennis' highly-touted replacement Michael Lichaa went down in round 23.

It saw Cook play the final five games that year, two of them finals outings, leaving him with nine NRL appearances in three years at the age of 24.

The story of persistence from there is well known. These days he's no one's deputy, at any level, making that week in 2014 seem like another life.

"That's rugby league, it's been a hell of a journey," Cook said.

"If everything goes the right way and we get the win [on Sunday], I'll be able to sit back in the off-season and look back at the journey and be proud of what I've done.

"It's hard [to do] at the moment because you're just trying to stay relaxed. You've got to soak it up because a grand final week's very exciting, but you've got to try as best you can to treat it like just another game.

"Hopefully I can learn from those big games of Origin and representing Australia and use those experiences for this big game and make it seem as normal as possible."

Of course it's anything but, even for a guy with a wardrobe full of Test and Origin jumpers.

"From when you're a young kid, you want to play an NRL grand final and you want to go on and win that grand final," he said.

"Those representative honours have been great, but this is the missing piece you really want to tick off in your career.

"Those [rep] games come and go so quickly. You win the games, you win the series', then you're back to club footy and it's all forgotten.

"This has definitely been a different build-up because it's been a year-long process and, for a few of us, a couple of years.

"We understand, after the last couple of years, how hard is to get there and we definitely don't want to waste this opportunity."

Much had been made of the Rabbitohs three-year run of outs at the prelim stage, with Cook and other stars copping some flak over the record.

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They cleared that hurdle last week, but the Helensburgh Tigers product says that's far from enough.

"You're going to cop that criticism being one of the senior players, especially being in the spine as well," he said.

"When the team loses you know [criticism] might come your way and I'm happy to take that responsibility on.

"Obviously we'd lost a couple [of prelims] but going into the weekend's game I was really confident we were going to get the job done.

"I think that was just off the back of how much more consistent we've been in the brand of footy we've been playing this year compared to the last couple of years.

"We've learned from the experiences in the past and we've got to where we need to. We've got one more job to do now."

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