It's also true that no one wants to be the first to be definitive. It's like the school disco - it's best to make any approach ambiguous so it can be denied without a loss of face. It's best to be unclear and open-ended rather than direct and affirmative.
Convention kind of sucks, though, especially in this case. There's reason enough already to be definitive. If there has been a better international rugby team in history, they should come out now and show themselves.
Which team would be able to stand comparison with the All Blacks of the past four years?
If the qualifiers are going to remain, from where is the doubt arising?
In the modern era at least, no other team has won back-to-back World Cups and that in itself is reason to see the current All Blacks as a cut above everything there has been before.
Of those sides who have previously won World Cups, would any be able to compare on the strength of their solitary title? The toughest competition to the current team would come from the 1987 All Blacks, who didn't lose again until 1990.
They were a special team with special players and in much the same way as the current crew, they kept challenging themselves to be better. Their big thing was the quest to play the perfect game.
When they were in their pomp, there wasn't a side on the planet that could contest them, so the challenge for Buck Shelford's team was to be their own enemy: to never be happy with outcome and only judge themselves on the quality of their performances.
For three years they were magnificent but they fell away sharply in the end, not doing enough to inject new blood and fresh legs which became a problem at the 1991 World Cup. Their defence of the title was far from impressive and on those grounds, they didn't have the same durability and longevity as the current team.
The 1991 Wallabies had plenty of class and were deserving winners, but they didn't dominate world rugby before or after, and that was definitely the case with the English team that won in 2003.
Between late 2001 and 2003 Martin Johnson's side were supreme - tough, resilient and way more talented than they were given credit for. But in 2004 they were diminished, without their captain who had retired.
None of these champion sides were able to carry their excellence through an entire World Cup cycle. All of them sustained a level of excellence for a period before slowly falling from their peak.
The truly amazing thing about this All Black era is that the team who won the 2015 tournament were better than the team who won four years earlier.
That's the unheard of part of what they have done - finding the resolve and desire to keep improving from an already high base.
How many teams, in any era, have managed to do that? How many have been able to sustain excellence for so long? None in the professional era and it gets a bit messy delving into the amateur era trying to compare and contrast such vastly different landscapes and apply meaning.
So best not to. Maybe just say this All Black side is the best the professional era has seen.
If there are doubts about that, there won't be in six months or a year. Time helps everything become clear and with distance, comes clarity.
What the All Blacks have achieved is unprecedented and that is surely the definition of being the greatest. Reaching a point no one else has.
