KEY POINTS:
When Brad Shaw crashed home the goal that broke Argentine hearts and sent the Black Sticks off to Beijing, hockey fans enthusiastically anticipated a year to savour.
But that extra-time golden goal for that epic 3-2 win in February's Olympic qualifier at Crown Relocations Stadium was left to
stand alone as the year's highlight.
The misery - on and off the field - culminating in last month's crippling funding cut as Sparc took a no-nonsense approach in withdrawing support for the national women's side outweighed any glory.
With nowhere to go - one hopes but up, new high-profile coach Mark Hager will have to do it on a shoestring. Hopefully he will get full support from his players, some thing Ian Rutledge, the last Australian in charge of the Black Sticks women, did not.
Hager, among the very best to play for his country, inherits a team who must rally after an Olympic campaign to forget and led stalwart Kevin Towns to quit. Never one to hide behind mediocrity, Towns left with a blunt "you can't have results like I did in Beijing and expect to carry on" message.
The new management has a fresh challenge: it was announced yesterday that New Zealand will replace Pakistan in an elite four-nation men's tournament to be hosted by India later this month.
Also in the tournament, to be played in Chandigarh from January 31-February 9, are reigning world and Olympic champions Germany and fourth-ranked Netherlands.
The women ended the year ranked 11th and out of contention for invitations to important ranking tournaments. It promises to be a long, difficult road to next year's Commonwealth Games and beyond that the 2012 London Olympics.
Their efforts made the pre-Games prediction from midfielder and 100-plus test veteran Emily Naylor who said: "We're going there to medal. That's our goal," seem a bit hollow.
The men fared better in Beijing after that thrilling win in their home qualifier. But even they had their card stamped "could do better" after finishing seventh when a shot at the medals beckoned.
They won three and drew one but were hurt by the last-ditch 1-0 loss to Spain and in being held 2-2 by the hosts.
Going forward, coach Shane McLeod has plenty to ponder including the loss of Paul Woolford, Bevan Hari and Gareth Brooks who between them took 457 international caps into retirement.
With an increasing exodus of Black Sticks to lucrative club contracts in Europe, McLeod must juggle his resources also resigning himself to not seeing his best at the domestic showpiece National Hockey League.
Even that is facing a return to years past when played as a tournament rather than the league format of recent times.
There were some encouraging signs else where.
The New Zealand under-16 girls took a coveted series win over Australia; Nick Wilson, 17, made a good fist of an early call to Black Sticks duty helping them to third place, without injured captain Ryan Archibald, at May's Sultan Azlan Shah tournament in Malaysia; and the Black Sticks women had some success with their win in a tri-series at home against China and Ireland.
Rex Smith guided North Harbour to their second NHL women's title in two years while former Black Stick Darren Smith pulled off the biggest triumph of his coaching career when unheralded Midlands beat hosts Auckland 3-2 in the men's final.
McLeod and Hager have it all in front of them in 2009.
With funding carefully tagged, they must make the most of their opportunities at the upcoming Champions Challenge and World Cup qualifiers or face barren times in the international arena.
Under long-serving chief executive Ramesh Patel, Hockey NZ kept a tight rein on their finances. Those resources will be spread even more thinly in these cash-strapped times. They must bounce back or be left behind in a sport which internationally continues to grow.
At least Patel can look to playing numbers - up at open and primary level and about the same at secondary and "mini" - as acknowledgment that hockey, with 43,000 registered players, is still a worthy contributor to New Zealand sport but it needs the results at the highest level to back that.
