With Russia on the verge of invading Ukraine and the police in Wellington dealing with a dirty protest, it's admittedly a tough argument to make that the big news to come out of last weekend is that it's now okay for the ball carrier in rugby to jump overprospective tacklers.
Tough to make stick, but worth a try all the same, because after two years of pandemic-enforced restrictions everyone is desperate to have something else to talk about other than traffic light systems, RAT procurement and the motley crew making a bother of themselves outside Parliament.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said as much herself on Monday, acknowledging that everyone is over Covid and desperate to live once again in a world where we no longer fly into a mini-rage at the supermarket car park for realising we have forgotten a mask and one where children no longer gasp in frustration at how long it takes their parents to successfully scan a QR code or find the wallet icon on their phone which contains they vaccine pass.
In the last two years we have been trying to get our heads around new processes, rules and vernacular, but now it's time to keep an eye out for the once familiar – little reminders that induce hope we are indeed tracking back to the comfortable rituals of our past.
This is where Super Rugby comes in as it can serve as an indicator of how well we are tracking in our search for the forgotten normal.
The new season of Super Rugby kicked off last weekend in Queenstown. Photo / Photosport
Super Rugby rendered itself a near irrelevancy in recent years by producing repetitive storylines that frustrated with their predictability.
But while that was once its greatest weakness, now we would all see it as a strength, or at least as a strangely comforting antidote to the chaotic events of recent times.
There will be something strangely reassuring to see Super Rugby, maligned as it is, played in Auckland, Hamilton, Wellington and Christchurch again as it soon will be.
What could better signal that everything in life is as it should be than the Crusaders beating everyone they play? We need to see Aaron Smith hopping madly and wildly behind his Highlanders forward pack to believe everything is okay again.
The Blues could do their bit to reassure everyone by following up their transtasman title last year by a stunning collapse in form. Nothing would confirm we are back in familiar territory than the Blues imploding.
And who knows, in a few weeks, we may even cherish hearing our iconic players telling us breathlessly after the game how proud they are of the boys, while promising that moving forward they will take the learnings of their latest defeat with them.
Which brings us back to the curious incident in Queenstown last weekend when Chiefs No 8 Pita Gus Sowakula was awarded a try after he hurdled Smith's attempted tackle.
Pita Gus Sowakula hurdled Aaron Smith to score for the Chiefs. Photo / Getty
Back in the old days when things were normal – the very time we all want to return to – that would have been a penalty to the Highlanders because leaving your feet when you had the ball was an absolute no-no.
The try stood on the basis that it's illegal to jump into a tackle, but not apparently, to jump over the tackle.
But that justification is curiously hard to make sense of, as while Sowakula is magnificently athletic, he could try the same trick next week, not leap to the same height and smash into the tackler causing serious physical damage to both parties.
We want Super Rugby to be the epitome of the old normal – clear and unambiguous so it can be the nation's reference point as we plot our way back to the world we know.
We don't want it to be yet one more thing beset by new rules that we battle to understand and then change the instant we have got our heads around them.
Therefore, it would be best if no distinction is made between jumping over or into a tackler – it's an illegal act regardless of outcome and there's enough New Zealanders already perplexed at the non-prosecution of clearly illegal acts.
