There was a line that divided the Wellington Lions' changing shed when the ITM season began. On one side stood the old heads, the men who had chewed on the sour buds of fruitless title campaigns and gagged on their awful taste. Though they couldn't have been called a majority, they carried with them the heavy burden of failure at the final hurdle. They were a reminder of how things that promise so much can amount to so little. For them the words of Heywood Broun rang true: "The great tragedy of life is not that man loses but that he almost wins."
On the other side sat the new breed of Wellington player, a crew of kids who hadn't sat in this very same room on a night when the songs of victory seeped through the other side's changing room door and leaked into theirs, filling the silence with the sound of what might have been. For them, motivation came not in thoughts of vengeance and failures past. For them, motivation was not the past at all, but a future that comes with titles and trophies and belief built upon the foundations of success rather than perennial potential.
The Wellington coaching staff could sense the line and began the work of moving it, and nudging it and pushing it and redefining it so that eventually, and without articulating the act, the players all stood on one side. No longer did the line divide the team, it unified the team. Here, on this side, now stood the Wellington Lions, edition 2013. On the other side: the ghosts. Suddenly all the players could look at that line and see it for what it really was: the line between then and now.
One coach spoke openly to his players about the mistakes of his own past and in the telling he reminded them that while those mistakes cannot be forgotten, they can serve to strengthen rather than to undermine. At some point, he told them, they cease to define who you are and begin to illustrate how far you have come. Perhaps it could prove yet to be the greatest of team talks, but there is one final chapter to be written in this ongoing exorcism of Wellington rugby.
That chapter begins tomorrow night, at 7.30pm, when the Cantabrians run on to Wellington's home track as both their grand final nemesis and polar opposite. This is a Canterbury side that has no need to push its past into the darkest corner of the changing room; a side whose only line is a dynastic one, the genesis of which can be traced back six years to the very venue they will play at tomorrow night; six years ago when a converted Hayden Hopgood try beat two Piri Weepu penalty goals and, in the lowest scoring final in Division One history, Canterbury lifted the first of five straight Cups.
