Craig Bellamy, aiming at becoming the Inspector Clouseau who could solve this Pink Panther mystery, spent a lot of the game chewing half of his mouth. Then he started on the other half. He tried to get the cap off his water bottle but failed – palms too sweaty.

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His comments were X-rated. The only times he really calmed down, and this is telling, were when Penrith scored. When Sunia Turuva and then Liam Martin went over in the second quarter of the match, Bellamy was perfectly still. He looked like Ivan.

This became impossible to watch: Bellamy too stressful, Cleary too Zen.

Just when Melbourne looked gassed, they revived. Only a Penrith pile-under stopped Jack Howarth from levelling the scores, according to the bunker anyway. It wouldn’t be the NRL without a divisive video call.

Deep into the second half, it was Melbourne galloping through a tired Penrith middle, and Brian To’o was off with a bung knee. Wingers have become indispensable, and To’o is the best. Penrith had to reorganise.

But Nathan Cleary broke the line and put up a kick. A bomb, as Inspector Clouseau once said, can be identified as the exploding kind. The match had been unusual for the approach, adopted by both sides, of the defenders to yield high kicks to the attackers.

This time, Liam Martin was allowed to catch Cleary’s bomb. Martin seemed to pass the wrong way, to the wrong man, but Moses Leota, a prop forward who embodies Penrith’s total football in his barrel of a form, popped the ball to Paul Alamoti, who planted the ball within a surgeon’s stitch of the in-goal sideline. For the first time, the teams were separated by more than a single score.

The Melbourne Storm dead? On came Lazarus (Vaalepu). A zombie onslaught from Melbourne, five straight sets in possession, was impaled by another thrust of pink self-defence. Howarth was thrown over the sideline. Bellamy this time became the exploding type of bomb, while Ivan the Unflappable checked the weather.

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In the final minutes, Nathan’s shoulder subluxed again, but his team was now in deluxe mode. Alamoti put his arm in Munster’s mouth, and Cameron became Herman. It had been a strip of dental floss between these two teams all along. That was probably the moment: Penrith got the penalty and weren’t going to lose.

That said, even in the last minute it was only a spectacular Alamoti leap that stopped the Storm from doing what they always do, which is score the last try and keep the thing alive. Now, definitely, you could separate them, after seven months, two Melbourne wins over Penrith, and 80 minutes. It’s quite likely that if Penrith and Melbourne played each other a hypothetical 10 times, they would win five each. Penrith just won the one that happened in real life.

Four in a row. It speaks for itself. Just don’t let anyone tell you it was a sure thing.