Fuifui Moimoi was sent off as rugby league newest team the Toronto Wolfpack secured a hard-fought 14-6 Challenge Cup win over English amateur champions Siddal in their first competitive fixture.
The sport's brave new trans-Atlantic era kicked off in a mud-bath of a pitch on a rain-lashed Yorkshire hillside on a day the assorted international stars of the Canadian side won't forget.
Beamed live worldwide via the BBC, Wolfpack's big debut had threatened to sink deeper than the touchline mud when Gareth Blackburn kicked the hosts into a first-half lead, then again when the same player was sent in for their only try shortly after the break.
Late tries from Greg Worthington and Adam Sidlow dug Toronto out of a hole but they had former Parramatta star Fuifui Moimo sent off late on in a game that ultimately said more about the great talent in the game's true heartland than the glamorous quest to send it spinning around the globe.
Siddal had never seen anything quite like it: their hardcore crowd of a couple of hundred swollen well above a thousand despite conditions which worsened throughout the game - and a plummeting temperature only three degrees higher than that currently being experienced in the Canadian winter.
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Toronto arrived with big expectations, having spent over a million pounds preparing for their League 1 campaign which will begin at London Skolars next weekend, and which will involve shipping all opposing teams out to play at their 10,000-capacity Lamport Stadium free of charge.
If the Wolfpack one day manage to realise their bullish ambitions of matching the might of Wigan and Leeds in Super League, they will hark back to their close shave amid the heavily buffeted burger and beer tents on this Halifax hillside.
