OPINION: For the student of rugby league, the game's appeal lies in how it embraces the whole curriculum: physics, psychology, history, and ultimately, and miserably if you are from New South Wales, mathematics.

For a decade of Origin football, New South Wales have been the masters of physics. Were the game purely about power, speed, impact, vectors of force in collision, the Blues would be regular winners. On Wednesday night, they again dominated the physical world.

But the higher the level of the game, the more it is about psychology. For all those years that New South Wales have been bigger, stronger and often faster than Queensland, they have also been, repetitively, dumber. Year after year, their stalwart captain Paul Gallen resembled a man arriving at a card night wearing his boxing gloves.

RYAN PIERSE/GETTY IMAGES Mitchell Pearce of the Blues looks dejected after the Maroons snatched a late victory.

At the Olympic stadium on Wednesday, with the series at their mercy after they established a ten-point lead in less than half an hour, they resembled men trying to play a game of chess with a baseball bat.

Even for those south of the border, it's hard not to have a soft spot for Queensland's smarts, their self-belief, their will to win and their composure. Their key men on Wednesday were again superior in decision-making amid the frenzy and fatigue of the moment. Cameron Smith, Johnathan Thurston and Cooper Cronk will be remembered as great players, but even more so as natural rugby league thinkers.

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CAMERON SPENCER/GETTY IMAGES Dane Gagai of the Maroons scores a try against New South Wales.

The danger signs for New South Wales lay in the history department. Laurie Daley's men were focused on repeating what they had done last match. From when they scored their third try, they seemed even more bent on continuing what they had already done before. But the more they thought about the past, the more they lost focus on the imminent future.

Queensland, by contrast, fortified by ten years of the muscle memory of success, were visibly intent on the immediate future: what to do now, how to solve the next riddle. Speed chess: not how to watch the clock, but how to beat it.

As a consequence, the longer the game went, the more Queensland made the running. New South Wales's leaders faded. Andrew Fifita, as closely watched as a radical student in the Moonlight State, had none of the influence of the first game. Jarryd Hayne, while playing one of the defensive games of his life, made crucial errors with the ball. Mitchell Pearce and James Maloney were new-generation playmakers for the first half, but old New South Wales for the second. There was no lack of effort. But for the past ten years, there never has been. The Blues never stopped trying; and for their supporters, they never stop being trying.

For the deciding game, at least the bluff and disguise will be gone. There was an air of make-believe in the lead-up to game two. New South Wales tried to be Queensland, going into the game unchanged, predictable, following the formula. Pick and stick. Meanwhile, Queensland seemed to be acting like New South Wales, making changes, experimenting with positions, hands hovering over the panic button. While the perennial losers strutted about like winners, the perennial winners were behaving like losers. What was real?

The game itself stripped all of that away. Queensland mastered the most important subject: mathematics, the iron rule of numbers. They scored through chain-passing to narrow the game from ten when it had seemed like thirty.

New South Wales had either forgotten what their real score was, or they were so conscious of it that they forgot how to increase it. They went into the last ten minutes with both eyes on the clock and none on the game. After Hayne fluffed a try by not passing to an unmarked Brett Morris in the 32nd minute, New South Wales never went close to crossing the line again. There was a feeling that Queensland, by contrast, would always find a way. We have seen it so often before, and so it was in the end. Defeated Queensland were, everywhere but the scoreboard. Again.

New South Wales went into this game with a strangely febrile mixture of supreme confidence in winning this game, coupled with a sense of doom about game three if they did not. The first assumption was wrong. It will be up to them to prove the second one wrong too.