And, most importantly in the current climate of uber vigilant refereeing, the Crusaders didn't give the Chiefs a slosh of easy penalties even when they were back-pedalling for much of the last 20 minutes of the first half.
The last time these two sides met was on a balmy summer evening in February and the Chiefs ran their way to victory that night. Their pass and catch was too good with a dry ball and firm track.
They obviously wanted to play much the same way but the slickness wasn't there in the rain and they presented too many easy targets for the army of red jerseys that were manning an almost impregnable defensive line.
If any team is going to beat the Crusaders on their home patch, they have to do it before May.
They have to do it before the cold grips and the home side effortlessly pull out their winter gameplan where they turn the screw at scrum time, double-team on defence, field high balls, kick long into space and pounce on every half mistake to generate scoreboard pressure.
It's tempting to say that based on the way the Crusaders patiently and clinically squeezed the Chiefs into their third straight defeat that the champions used this weekend to confirm they are Super Rugby's most resilient team.
But they have a challenger now. The Blues have stiffened their resolve to the point they could head down to Christchurch and possibly win.
It's a maybe but it's not impossible to imagine it happening. It would take a Herculean effort by the Blues but they look like they have that sort of performance in them as gone is the mental fragility that rendered all their latent talent moot.
They might not be feeling so convinced about their readiness to topple the Crusaders in the wake of their nervy three-point win.
They will feel their performance against the Highlanders was their least impressive of the victories they have posted this season. They left the door for the Highlanders to claw their way back in and just about steal an unlikely win. But that's the point – it was only just about and while the Blues were guilty of drifting in and out of the game, they held on.
They won the critical moments. They found a way to hold their composure when it mattered, which is the exact definition of resilience.
The Highlanders had the crowbar out and were trying to leverage the many cracks they felt they could see, but the Blues didn't break and they have something solid at their core now. They are not the flaky bunch of old.
This was the enormous breakthrough moment that demands they now be taken seriously as a genuine force as the Blues of the last decade would never have won that game.
They were the masters at cracking under pressure in the final quarter.
You could set your watch by it – come 60 minutes the mistakes would come and the momentum would turn against them until they had successfully plucked defeat from the jaws of victory.
But at Eden Park, captain Patrick Tuipulotu exuded calm and authority in those final 10 minutes. Hoskins Sotutu kept smashing up the middle, Akira Ioane wasn't so far behind and the Blues were in a proper scrap - all present and correct.
And that included their decision-makers in the play-making roles. They did the right thing at the right times and while Beauden Barrett has yet to show much of his running ability, he's played a brilliant hand with his tactical control and percentage plays that have put his team in the right places to win games.
There has been an old school vibe about Super Rugby since it returned and that is only deepening with the Crusaders and Blues setting themselves up as the two teams to beat.
