New Napier City Council chief executive Wayne Jack couldn't have planned it better: Just back in town, first day on the job, joins the Mayor to welcome home the first Hawke's Bay team to win the Ranfurly Shield in 44 years.
"It's fantastic," he said yesterday, between a busy schedule of appointments, during which he's found his old town in particularly buoyant mood, thanks to the success of a bunch of blokes chasing a ball around an indoor rugby field in Dunedin last Sunday.
"It's my good luck," he reckoned.
He couldn't remember any of the games the last time Hawke's Bay won the Shield, which was not surprising considering he was born during the Magpies' 1966-69 Shield era.
He also hadn't particularly been a rugby man, a bit of soccer being his winter code, but he has a tidy sports background.
In 1982, as a 14-year-old pupil of Tamatea High School, he swam Cook Strait, the youngest to succeed of the 25 crossings swum since Barry Devonport's historic 11hrs 20mins splash 20 years earlier. At surf lifesaving he was also a national junior Ironman champion.
The timing of the chance to return to Napier, in its top civic job, is also Mr Jack's good luck, for he had been corporate services manager at Yarra Ranges Council in Victoria, Australia, just nine months when in June he saw the advertisement for the job being vacated by retiring long-serving Napier council chief executive Neil Taylor.
"It was too good an opportunity to pass up," he said.
Having previously been corporate services manager at the Lake McQuarrie City Council, north of Sydney, with a staff of 1100 and a population exceeding 200,000, he had aspired to the top job of such an authority.
It was an added bonus that it was Napier, to which he's now returned with wife Tracy, another former Tamatea High School pupil, although they didn't meet until they were both in the Navy.
He sees similarities in Lake McQuarrie and Napier, with ambitions for tourism and economic growth.
Lake McQuarrie also has a bit of earthquake history, having felt some of the impact of the 1989 Newcastle quake, but the civil defence issues in the Yarra Valley and Ranges were bush fires.
It was coincidental that one of his first meetings in the new job was for Civil Defence management.
Naturally, he'll get to the rugby tomorrow, but then it's back to the job in a city where he notes that it is not only the rugby that is catching people's attention.