Broncos players had one hand on the 2023 NRL premiership trophy, and in 26 minutes of Nathan Cleary magic it was snatched away from them in the most brutal fashion.

And if the pain of losing the grand final from 16 points up wasn’t hard enough to cope with, they were forced to relive it only a couple of months later.

Brisbane coach Kevin Walters sat the entire squad down as soon as they returned for pre-season, and made them watch those 26 minutes of heartbreak.

While Walters called them “highlights” it certainly didn’t feel that way for the beaten players.

“I didn’t want to do it at the time,” veteran halfback Adam Reynolds told Wide World of Sports.

Even Walters’ son, Billy, says he was filthy at his father for forcing the team to relive their nightmare.

“I didn’t think there was much point doing that, I thought he was bringing up old wounds,” Walters told WWOS.

“But he made a good point that we need to learn from it and get over it, put it in the past, so we’ve done that.

We don’t talk about it anymore.

I think I realised after we watched it and after he spoke to us about it that it was a good thing to do, so we weren’t looking back on it or wondering what went wrong.

“We addressed it that day and now it’s buried.