INEXORABLY is a dangerous word to use because it means something is definitely going to happen. But if it doesn't happen you'll forget by then anyway, so stuff it. The NRL competition is moving inexorably towards a Melbourne-Penrith grand final.
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The NRL competition is moving inexorably towards a Melbourne-Penrith grand final.
And that will be a good thing, because what a hell of a contest those two teams will serve up in the biggest game of the season.
It will be like the recession we had to have when Paul Keating was Federal Treasurer, only much more fun.
And it would mark a return to a Storm-Panthers decider, but in vastly different circumstances to the first and only time that has happened, in 2020.
Penrith bolted in with the minor premiership that year. They were the team on the rise after missing the finals the previous year. But a rise is never complete until you finish it off in the finals and they couldn't do that.
The Panthers hadn't appeared in a grand final since 2003. It wasn't in their DNA as a club and it showed in the grand final when they rushed things in the first half, made mistake after mistake and trailed 22-0 at the break.
The Storm were grand-final hardened, having appeared in that game for three straight years from 2016-18.
But they had won only one of those matches, so they were still very much premiership hungry as well.
That's a dangerous combination against an opposition that could only presume what the game was going to be like and didn't know from experience.
Melbourne just had to do Melbourne things and that's exactly what they did. They played a patient game and waited for Penrith mistakes to give them opportunities. Those opportunities came in spades.
And then they just had to hold tight in the face of a naturally anticipated comeback in the second half after the Panthers had reached their dressing-room, taken a breath, said "What the hell just happened?" and came up with a plan to do something about it. It was 26-20 to the Storm in the end.
Penrith went on to win the next three grand finals. Melbourne didn't make it to any of those games, but they've continued to be thereabouts as contenders.
Predicting this will be the season when the Storm are no longer genuine contenders and will even drop out of the top eight has become a dangerous occupation over the years.
It's like predicting the tide will stop coming in. You're just going to look stupid. And you'll get wet up to your waist.
Storm coach Craig Bellamy is the master of reinventing a team and always has been.
As soon as it looks like there are significant holes in the side he gradually plugs those with players you're often surprised can plug them - and then they do more than that.
The bottom line is that we're not Bellamy and he is.
Older league fans will remember the great Canberra and Brisbane teams of the late 1980s and early '90s.
The Raiders won premierships in 1989-90 and '94 and the Broncos in 1992-93, but they never met in a grand final during that period and that was unfortunate, because it inevitably would've been a classic.
A Storm-Panthers grand final this year would be like a Canberra-Brisbane grand final would've been then.
What have third-placed Cronulla and the teams currently making up the bottom half of the top eight - Manly, Canterbury, the Dolphins and North Queensland - got that the Storm and Panthers haven't got and more?
Same for those teams that are outside of the top eight but still hoping to get in, including last year's beaten grand finalists Brisbane?
As much as I enjoy watching the Broncos play when they're on their game, I don't have faith in their ability to do something special from here.
They haven't responded nearly well enough to what happened to them in last year's decider, when they led the Panthers 24-8 inside the last 20 minutes only to lose 26-24. I know they've had injuries to key players, but so have a lot of teams - including the Storm and Panthers.
Brisbane are still four points outside of the top eight at this stage. Even if they somehow make the finals it will be towards the bottom of the eight and I don't see them having the resolve to win four straight games from there.
I've left fourth-placed Sydney Roosters until last because they are the most intriguing of the prominent teams outside of Melbourne and Penrith.
In the wake of their 24-8 loss to the Storm last weekend the media have made a huge deal of the fact the Roosters have won just one of 20 combined matches against the Storm and Panthers from 2020-24.
We all love a good statistic and that is a killer stat.
It's a beauty for the media because they can just throw it in the faces of the Roosters and wait for a response.
It's very hard to defend a record like that no matter how you try. It means what it says, until it changes.
The Roosters are stacked with big-name players and will likely finish in the top four. But are they as good as either the Storm or Panthers? Well, no. Can they hope to be, in what's left of this season? Probably not.
It's not like their record against those teams has only just gone sour. They're batting at five per cent over five seasons.
But I guess it could be worse.
As the late, great George Harrison of The Beatles wrote about a completely different subject in Taxman, off the classic Revolver album: Should five per cent appear too small, be thankful I don't take it all.
