Otago Daily Times photographer Craig Baxter has been to a rugby game at the Melbourne Cricket Ground that was played in front of 100,000 fans but he has never experienced an atmosphere like Saturday night. He explains why photographing the All Whites' win was such a personal odyssey.
If there is such a thing as a quiet football fan, I am one.
The quiet football fans, they don't talk football with the football nutters at work, mainly because they don't have their knowledge.
They love the game and watch it as often as they can, but they don't religiously follow a team, know all their games or all their players.
They just love watching the game.
Not able to play sport growing up, I became what you might call an avid sport "watcher".
Big league football on Sunday was a weekly highlight, but the FA cup was always the biggest game of the year.
Every year my father, never a sports fan, would wake me, cook cheese on toast and watch the game with me.
He must have hated extra time, but I thought life couldn't get better.
Then, in 1981, something magical happened.
There was a new team on our television.
They were called the All Whites.
My football watching became an obsession.
I had the posters, the books, the coffee mugs, the lunchbox.
I taped every game on the radio.
My Subbuteo (football table) scoreboard came with the names of every football-playing nation in the world except New Zealand.
I added us on.
My blue and white Manchester City team (I was a United fan before it was cool, but I always ended up with blue and white players) became the All Whites, the road to Spain re-enacted on the Subbuteo pitch.
The '81-'82 team was the most unlikely mob of sporting heroes, but me and my friend Tony knew everything about them.
Photographing the men of that great team 28 years later brought back all those great memories.
Seeing those now middle-aged faces with their familiar names on the pitch again, with 35,000 people cheering them on . . . well, let's just say it was enough to bring a tear to most of their eyes, and maybe even to the eye of a quiet football fan.
1981-82 was the highlight of my sport-watching career and Tony and I thought we'd never see a New Zealand team at the biggest sporting event in the world again.
I picked up a love of sports photography while shooting friends playing football for mighty Mornington.
Since then I've been lucky to photograph some incredible sporting events - in fact, I have a bucket list of events I still want to cover - but the atmosphere in Wellington on Saturday was something very, very special.
Those 35,000 people at the Cake Tin made more noise than 100,000 at the MCG, hands down.
Being on that sideline, looking up at that hyped crowd and just knowing you were about to be part of New Zealand sporting history made all those Saturdays on the freezing cold sidelines of Mornington Park well worthwhile.
Does it surpass the 1982 road to Spain?
It's too soon to say.
I was too nervous to enjoy the game and it wasn't until I watched the replay later that it sunk in that we were really going to the World Cup.
Photographing the All Whites qualifying for the World Cup - bucket list tick.