Sometimes it feels as though there is more than just a single victory, a single championship on the line.
Sometimes, it feels as though it is about legacy.
And sometimes, it takes the worst penalty in the long, long history of a league to secure that, and break the hearts of an entire province and its vast Diaspora in the process.
Down the road, perhaps, it will be recorded simply as the Montreal Alouettes' 28-27 victory over the Saskatchewan Roughriders in the 97th Grey Cup game, allowing the Als to break out of a one-for-six funk in the championships they have contested since 2000.
Perhaps it will be remembered as the day when a surefire Hall of Fame quarterback at least partially erased the asterisk that would have accompanied his bust to the shrine in Steeltown. Anthony Calvillo, coming off another great season, in which he was adjudged the Canadian Football League's most valuable player at the ripe old age of 37, came through magnificently in the clutch.
But for now and for the foreseeable future, how can you get past the fact that someone in green was unable to count to 12? How can you explain that after the Als drove the ball to the Saskatchewan 36 yard line in the dying seconds of the fourth quarter, trailing by two points, setting up an eminently makeable field goal with the wind at his back for the all star kicker Damon Duval, no one bothered to make sure that the Riders had the right number of players on the field?
Duval missed - which would have gone down as one of the great choke moments in Grey Cup history.
Instead, he was taken off the hook because the Riders had 13 men on the field, and no one noticed, no one called a timeout, no one ran for the sidelines.
The kick was retaken 10 yards closer after the penalty, the result was as different as it could possibly be, and now how do you like those Alouettes?
Truth is, the comeback began immediately after the halftime break, when the Als returned after hearing Blue Rodeo play their beautiful sad songs, as though they had already read their Grey Cup obituaries, again.
Saskatchewan led 17-3, the Alouettes had been listless and tentative from the opening kickoff, and a familiar pattern seemed to have emerged, much to the delight of the folks who had somehow managed to turn McMahon Stadium nearly entirely green for a night.
What emerged during the final two quarters, and especially during the final 10 minutes, when the Als, trailing by 16 points roared back to trail by two (and could have argued strenuously that an interference penalty uncalled on a two-point convert attempt had robbed them of a late game tie) was a great team finally calling the shots.
Their defence, which had suddenly returned to its dominant regular-season form, had made Saskatchewan quarterback Darian Durant look young and unsteady and unable to close the show, stuffed the Riders deep in their own end, forcing a punt against the wind. Calvillo took over then, moving them into Duval's field-goal range, full marks for the victory even given the strange events on the final play, times two.
And if that result suggested that god isn't green after all, if they'll be arguing forever in Regina and Saskatoon and every outposts of provincial exiles about who was responsible for the colossal gaffe, in Montreal there will be a feeling that it all turned out for the right, that justice in a strange way was done.
The greatest CFL team of the first decade of the century can shake off at least some of the comparisons to the greatest choke artists in sports history, to sides that repeatedly found a way to lose the final game of the season.
See the game from beginning to end, give credit where credit is due, put aside some of that underdog sentiment and there's no arguing that they didn't deserve it.