As the rain fell on Leichhardt Oval in front of a few thousand diehards, Tom Trbojevic tried to begin his second miracle.

Trbojevic wasn't looking to stretch out in the 28-4 trial win over Wests Tigers. There's no need to have too much skin in this game.

The Manly superstar played 40 minutes but still came up with some classy touches, including an assist for Brad Parker with a nice short ball and a quality offload in the lead-up to a Reuben Garrick try.

He also exploded onto an inside pass from Daly Cherry-Evans just before half-time, weaved past two more defenders and fired a pass out to his younger brother Ben, who put Christian Tuipulotu over to score in the corner.

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"He's worked hard and the boys have worked hard when they needed to, to take it to another level, that's what it's all about. It's early days," Manly coach Des Hasler said.

"The first half was tidy enough, if a bit scrappy in parts. We got through it injury free, which is the main thing. 

"Across the park there were some good performances. But it's only 40 minutes of footy, we can't get too carried away."

With apologies Des, when it comes to Trbojevic, it's hard to not get carried away. Because if really turning it on, you'd reckon the raindrops would have a hard time hitting him.

It's what we've come to expect from the Manly star, but in 2022 he will be chasing a different type of greatness.

Trbojevic's 2021 season brought comparisons to Jarryd Hayne in 2009, Todd Carney in 2010 and Ben Barba in 2012, but not to Johnathan Thurston's stellar 2015 campaign, or Cameron Smith's exemplary play through 2017.

The reason for this is simple: as good as Thurston and Smith were in those years, they were simply one brilliant season among many; the brightest jewel in a treasure chest full of them. Because Thurston and Smith were so great for so long, that greatness can blur together.

Think about some of the iconic Thurston moments and there's memories from 2005 to 2018, four Dally M campaigns among them, and when there's that quantity of brilliance, time can lose it's meaning.

It's the same for Smith, who by sheer accumulation of achievement overwhelmed any sense of rising and falling through his career.

Hayne and Barba and Carney all stand out because those seasons are one of one, never to be repeated, never to be seen again before or since.

Even though Hayne won a second Dally M in 2014 and Barba played some great football at the Sharks when they won the premiership in 2016, their second efforts could only ever be sequels.

And unless it's the The Godfather, The Empire Strikes Back or Johnathan Thurston, sequels rarely match originals.

During the pre-season, everything old becomes new again, and there will be talk at some point claiming Trbojevic has trained the house down after the toughest pre-season ever and will not only match his efforts of last year, but surpass them.

Asking him to do either is setting him up to fail – 2021 may well be the best Trbojevic will ever play in his career, a peak rather than a new baseline. There's nothing wrong with that, everybody has a peak at some point and barring another mutiny from his hamstrings, Trbojevic will still enjoy a very good season at the very least.

But if Trbojevic can run last year even a little bit close, if he can play nearly as well and avoid the drop off that hit Hayne and Carney and Barba, it catapults him from a very good player with one stellar season and closer to that same level where Thurston and Smith and Billy Slater and Cooper Cronk sit in the pantheon of rugby league excellence.

Those four — the finest footballers of their generation — are of another era. Currently, the only player on that level, the only player to whom we have become accustomed to his greatness is Roosters fullback James Tedesco.

Nathan Cleary is rapidly closing in on that kind of expected brilliance, albeit without a Dally M medal of his own. Trbojevic completes the triumvirate of the game's top players and, remarkably, still has the most to gain.

Trbojevic is yet to play in a grand final, which has become the last vacancy on his rugby league resume. He has done everything he can possibly do get Manly to that level — the Sea Eagles can ask no more of him given last year he did everything one man possibly could do for his team, and they must make up the margins somewhere else.

Perhaps that will come from the Sea Eagles' forward pack, adding the underrated Ethan Bullemor for a little extra punch.

The former Bronco impressed in this match on the edge and seems set to fill in for the injured Josh Schuster for the first few weeks of the competition. After that he should shore up their middle rotation and give them a bit of extra leg speed off the bench.

Or maybe Kieran Foran, with another pre-season under his belt after his first injury-free campaign in a long time, can improve on his very solid 2021 season.

Foran looked sharp moving across the Leichhardt turf, with flashes of the player who once caused one of the NRL's great bidding wars. The tough five-eighth still has plenty of game and links so well with Trbojevic down the left edge.

Ben Trbojevic was also impressive, and should play more of a role in first grade this season. These might sound like little things, but when they're all added together they end up becoming big things, and that's what will help the Sea Eagles make up the difference on the likes of Penrith, Melbourne and the Roosters.

Still, Tom Trbojevic's destiny will not be decided at Leichhardt Oval on a February night. This was but a small step in a long journey and regardless of what happens in the rest of 2022, Trbojevic is and has been a great player.

But that's the thing about greatness: it's not a birthright, but a destination, a path with no real ending. Some players walk the road for a while before falling away, some stay steady and some go so far ahead of everybody else they almost disappear from view.

They leave everybody else behind because they belong to the ages. We can still see Tom Trbojevic, but we might not for much longer. He's vanishing into the distance.