It is the question every Queensland great gets asked. After 36 Origin appearances, after the captaincy passing through his hands, after a list of bench-final, last-second moments that would fill a highlights reel on its own — what was the one?
Darren Lockyer, sitting across from interviewer Hannah Hollis on Fox League's Face-To-Face, did not pause for very long.
"It's hard to go past '06," Lockyer said. "Picking up that loose ball was a defining moment in many ways."
It is the answer Queenslanders wanted, and the one outsiders would have predicted. The 2006 series — eighteenth in the books, third for Lockyer as captain — has stayed in the rugby league memory because of how thin the margin felt and how completely the Maroons closed it out. Lockyer's pickup off the deck became the freeze-frame for a Queensland side just beginning the eight-in-a-row that would change Origin forever.
But the better stories were the ones around it.
Lockyer was asked who he would have been without Wayne Bennett, the coach he came to under at the Broncos and stayed with through three premierships, a Clive Churchill medal and 355 first-grade games.
"No way," Lockyer said. "Wayne teaches you the game, but he teaches you more about life. For a lot of players that have come through under Wayne, they would all say the same thing — that to get longevity out of your career, to get performance out of your career consistently over a long period of time, you need a great mentor for that."
The relationship has not been without bumps. Asked directly about the cooler period between coach and captain, Lockyer was honest.
"We're not on great speaking terms, but I wouldn't expect us to be on great speaking terms the way it all unfolded," he said. "But look, over time we'll cross bars and we'll win bridges."
He confirmed the two have repaired the relationship in the years since. "I just think we'd known each other for too long not to be able to talk to each other," he said.
The other big "what if" running through the chat was Lockyer's near-miss with the AFL. His father had played the game in Brisbane and trialled with Carlton. Until the family moved west to the truck-stop town of Wandoan, Lockyer assumed AFL was the rest of his life.
"To my great disappointment at the time, they only play one game in one Wandoan, and that's rugby league," Lockyer said.
When Kevin Sheedy and Essendon eventually came calling years later, Lockyer thought about it — but only briefly.
"I had to think about it for a bit, because it was always probably a dream as a seven, eight-year-old to go and play at the highest level in AFL," he said. "But obviously, not having played the game for a long time, I knew it would be a failure."
Roma gave him an early dose of senior football against grown men at fifteen. Cyril Connell, the Broncos talent scout, found him at an under-14 carnival on the Sunshine Coast.
"For him to come and show interest in me, that was really a big moment," Lockyer said.
The Broncos cult system meant a teenager Lockyer was suddenly training in pre-season alongside Allan Langer, Kevin Walters and Steve Renouf — the men whose 1992 and 1993 grand final tries he had watched on a school night. The first NRL appearance came against Parramatta in Sydney with Brisbane already 30 ahead, "so the game was over". The first try followed soon enough.
He played fullback until 2004, when Bennett moved him to five-eighth — a switch Tim Sheens would later credit with pioneering the modern ball-playing No. 1.
"Wayne saw an opportunity in me that maybe fullback could suit me," Lockyer said. "I loved it because I wanted to have freedom on the field. I could do what I want, just follow the ball or pop up wherever into space."
Through it all — the four premierships, the dual Golden Boots in two different positions, the Origin captaincy he inherited at 24 when Gorden Tallis hurt his neck — the through-line, Lockyer said, was something he'd taken from watching Wally Lewis as a kid.
"You've got to stay calm," Lockyer said. "When we got a lot of chaos going on, the best way to navigate through the chaos is to stay calm."
For a country kid from Wandoan with the trademark gravelly voice — broken in 1999 against the North Sydney Bears, never quite the same since — it has been the answer to most questions, including the easy ones.
