The New Zealand rugby season finished on Sunday, for me anyway. It finished at Memorial Park in Cambridge, as Auckland won the Northern Region Sevens and qualified in top spot for the national sevens championships in January.
It finished 11 months after it began. It's been a long year.
It's hard to remember as far back as the first game of the season. It's hard to condense an entire season into a 700-word column. There is little point cataloguing the results or thinking about the stats, just as there is little point trying to remember every play I witnessed or every scoreline I scribbled on my hand-written team sheets. They'll come back to me at some point; fragments of wintry nights in Invercargill or windy ones in Wellington. They sit in folders in the back of the wardrobe, along with all the other ones from all the other seasons.
I remember conversations, at least parts of them. I remember talking to Jamie Joseph at the start of the Super Rugby season, sitting in the stands at Forsyth Barr stadium as the sun flooded through the plastic roof and groundsman Ox Eathorne watered his turf. He told me they didn't talk about being battlers anymore at the Highlanders. He told me they didn't mind travelling at the end of the season - it gave them all a break from their wives and girlfriends, he reckoned. He told me they had the men to do the job.
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Advertise with NZME.I remember talking to Joseph after his men had done the job, while he ate kina with the Hart brothers and drank champagne. Earlier, Elliot Dixon had scored his impossible try right in front of me, and I had stood in the tunnel as the Highlanders came out of their changing room after halftime. Aaron Smith, last out the door, barked, "They said we couldn't do it!" As far as rallying calls go, it was the best one of the year.
There were other victories, too. I remember Ihaia West kicking the conversion for Hawkes Bay's win in the Championship final against Wellington. Two years earlier, West had missed a championship-winning kick against Tasman. What must have been going through his mind as he lined up that ball? There can be no lonelier place on a rugby field than at the top of a kicker's run up.
At Eden Park, the All Blacks crushed the Wallabies to retain the Bledisloe Cup. It may not have been their biggest win of the season, but it marked the end of the line, domestically at least, for so many wonderful players. I stood in the middle of the park after the match, preparing for the presentation ceremony, and suddenly realised no one - no one - had left the stands. They saluted Richie McCaw on the occasion of his record-setting test appearance. No one wanted it to end.
There were victories, and there were losses. I remember receiving the news of the death of Jerry Collins. I remember receiving the news of the death of Norm Berryman. Who could forget the news of the passing of Jonah Lomu? I had known each of those men. Norm was a childhood hero, Jonah was always humble and delightful, and Jerry had given me my first official post-test match role: find two cigarettes for him and be waiting in the tunnel at fulltime.
And in between the highs and the lows, there was the everyday life of rugby. There was roast chicken after training on a cold, clear night in Te Aroha with the College Old Boys Rugby and Sports premiers; the old-timers draining handles around the leaner, the condensation dripping off the windows. There were the fundraisers at North Shore and Mangakahia and in Hornby, where the folk of Glenmark gathered to raise the money they needed to rebuild the burned-down Omihi Hall. And there were halftime oranges on the muddy fields of Johnsonville as George White and the under-12s tackled hard and played fair.
That's how it was, up and down the country, and on Sunday it came to an end for another year at Memorial Park in Cambridge. And Pod Turner and I jumped in the car and headed back to Auckland, and talked about next season, which, as long as this one has been, can't come soon enough for me.
