IN among 35 minutes of positive spin and goodwill towards mankind came a revelation that Sporting Declaration has spent the past few days pondering.
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"When I first came to the club I said to my wife, the starting spot where we were, we were definitely going to run last for the first two years," Nathan Brown declared at a press conference on Wednesday, as he discussed the mutually agreed decision to stand aside as the Newcastle Knights' head coach at the end of this season.
Of all the quotable quotes dished up in the auditorium at Wests Mayfield, for some reason that was the one that stuck in my mind.
Let's just rewind. When Nathan Brown arrived at the Knights in late 2015, it did not take him long to realise they would spend the next two years in the competition cellar.
Perhaps he did not need a crystal ball to reach that conclusion, given that Newcastle were already the incumbent wooden spooners, and had parted company with the likes of Kurt Gidley, Beau Scott, James McManus, Chris Houston, Clint Newton, David Fa'alogo and Tyrone Roberts.
The worst team in the competition, in other words, had lost more than 1000 games of first-grade experience.
Brown had already spent more than a decade as a head coach, with St George Illawarra, Huddersfield and St Helens, so he had been around long enough to have a fair idea what he was getting himself into.
But his brutally frank appraisal has prompted this columnist to raise and dissect a couple of questions: why were the Knights in such dire shape, and were their long-suffering fans given fair warning?
Brown said on Wednesday there were "a million reasons", describing the club as a "basket case" that he soon discovered was in even worse condition than he had anticipated.
Any number of factors presumably contributed.
Newcastle's salary cap was by all accounts a shambles, and the club had churned through four coaches in little more than 12 months.
It was also, after the demise in mid-2014 of controversial Nathan Tinkler, under the interim ownership of the NRL, which presumably had no intention of spending one cent more than was absolutely necessary to keep the operation viable.
Clearly there was a dearth of quality players, prompting Brown to promote a host of rookies before they were ready.
All of which are valid reasons for any team to struggle in a competition as ruthlessly competitive as the NRL. But three consecutive wooden spoons?
To put that in context, only four other clubs in the code's 112 seasons have endured such ignominy, and three of them - University, Newtown and Gold Coast Seagulls - are defunct.
In the NRL era, which kicked off in 1998, only South Sydney (2003-04) and Parramatta (2012-13) had finished bottom in consecutive campaigns, prior to Newcastle (2015-17).
Usually what happens is a team will finish last, bottom out, and the following season make progress up the ladder. Some of them, like Parramatta this season, or the Roosters, who went from wooden spooners in 2009 to grand finalists a year later, manage to do so spectacularly.
Yet before a ball was kicked in his tenure, regardless of what misfortune befell other clubs, Brown was resigned to spending the next two years beneath all of them.
The only conclusion that I can reach is that this was the price Knights officials were willing to pay, and the job Brown was hired to do.
The Wayne Bennett approach of signing veteran mercenaries produced underwhelming results, so Newcastle opted to start from scratch with a complete cleanout. That process meant Newcastle's top-earning players - invariably those with the most experience - were the most vulnerable. The sooner they could be off-loaded, the sooner the Knights could recalibrate their roster.
In other words, the club's own policy was a contributing factor. The more pain the Knights endured, the healthier they would eventually become.
Sounds reasonable in theory. The only issue being that there are no guarantees. Newcastle's position on the points table this season stands as testimony to that.
The other sticking point, for mine, is that the Novocastrian faithful were basically left to read between the lines and figure it out for themselves.
I don't recall the powers-that-be saying at any point: "We're going to run last for the next two years, and we're not particularly worried about that. But of course we don't expect our supporters to pay full freight for a second-rate product, so we'll be discounting season tickets and merchandise."
Realistically no club, let alone one that until the takeover by the Wests Group had struggled to pay its bills, is ever going to make such an offer.
The point being that no matter how bad the on-field results, coach Brown, his players and club officials continued to be paid.
Yet the most important people in the history of the Knights have always been their fans. They have remained staunch.
Their reward should be an assurance that their club will never again slump to such a low ebb.