Dylan Cleaver's Midweek Fixture: A love song to Team New Zealand

We didn't need red socks or a tortured song to make us fall for the team of the year - just a fast boat and a helmsman who is the antithesis of rock-star cool.

Yep, it's awfully hard not to like Team New Zealand, okay, why not, Emirates Team New Zealand. The sponsors deserve their moment in the sea and sun. So grab yourself a Nespresso, a Steinlager if you check your Omega watch and see you've hit beer o'clock (but not if you've driving ... a Toyota of course, with low-profile Pirelli tyres), pull up a chair and ponder what has made this team so irresistibly engaging.

Winning the Auld Mug helps, of course it bloody does, but we were falling pretty hard for these patient mariners when they were pitch-poling their way through the challenger series.

Their involvement in this regatta on a small island in the middle of a vast ocean 15,000km from home has become less a sporting expedition and more a cultural phenomenon.

Why?

Let's be blunt, yachting is hardly a sport for all New Zealanders. It'd be a fair assumption that while most of us will at some stage toss a rugby ball about or enjoy a lazy afternoon of backyard cricket, about 90 per cent of us will never step foot on a high-performance sailboat.

Yet these guys appear so relatable and their mission seems so entwined with out national sensibilities that all but hardened cynics have been waking earlier than usual to try to comprehend a sport long considered incomprehensible.

We love the fact that Peter Burling will go to press conferences with sunburnt extremities, an angry zit on his head and the country's most defiant thatch of hair and appear utterly unfazed by whatever is thrown his way.

Who couldn't be won over by the following exchange ...

Jimmy Spithill: "The good news is we're only one down."

Interviewer: Peter, what's the good news for you?

Burling: "We're one up, I suppose."

We love the fact that Blair Tuke - the eternal cool kid at the party, the yin to Burling's yang - seems happy to bask in reflected glory of his illustrious mate, despite many rating his sailing skills as highly.

We love the fact that skipper Glenn Ashby chose to stay when others didn't; that he has channelled two crushing defeats - a silver at the Beijing Olympics and San Francisco (sorry, someone had to bring it up) - into an unquenchable thirst for America's Cup victory. And to do it for New Zealand, against a team stacked with his compatriots. Let's hope we never give this Australian back.

We love the fact that Stephen Tindall, Bob Field and Gary Paykel recognised that Grant Dalton was the right man, perhaps the only man, who could keep Team New Zealand's doors open and get them to Bermuda.

We also love the fact they convinced him to ease himself into the background. We love the fact he listened. We love the fact that he stopped asking us for money, too.

We love the idea of aggressive and innovative design. In an event noted for its one-design conventions, Team NZ dared to be different.

We love the fact Team NZ didn't whore themselves to Oracle Team USA in the hope of crumbs from Larry Ellison's well-laden table.

In essence, that may be where the true love emanates from.

They did it their way by doing it our way. By selling us the narrative that we were a little nation of under-funded battlers taking on a team from the world's most powerful democracy, funded by a software bazillionaire, led by a man we used to love calling our own, and skippered by an Australian.

And we - yes, we - beat them at their own game.

Who couldn't love that story?

• Dylan Cleaver's Midweek Fixture usually appears on a Wednesday, but he was so smitten by events in Bermuda that he couldn't wait.