Cheeky, feisty, talented All Black Aaron Smith must be wishing the clock could be wound back. The toilet disgrace has disrupted his sparkling career and will forever hang over him.
Just as Tukoroirangi Morgan will never be able to cast off an association with expensive underpants, so will Smith never entirely shed the legacy of his actions that afternoon in Christchurch.
Time will help, and the details will fade. Who remembers, for example, the details of the Tuku Morgan scandal apart from the tag to underpants?
Mr Morgan was a New Zealand First MP in 1997 and he spent $4000 of Aotearoa Television money on clothes, including a pair of $89 underpants.
At the moment, however, Smith is not uppermost in the sporting and public mind as the best halfback in the world but as the person who, at a busy airport with lots of children and fans around and in team formal travelling attire, spent five to 10 minutes in a disabled toilet with a woman.
There are those who blame the blame heaped on Smith on the media. What he did might have been unedifying but it was not illegal.
The private lives of All Blacks should be just that - private. And it is true much of the media, abetted by a clicking public, feasted on the unsavoury incident in an unseemly and over-the-top way. ''Tabloid'' media in New Zealand has well and truly arrived.
But Smith, as he no doubt realises, was foolish. The team he represents prides itself on its standards and leverages off these for public and sponsor support.
''Better people make better All Blacks,'' we are told. While no-one expects vigorous young men participating in a brutal, competitive contact sport to be choir boys, the All Blacks play to an image.
They visit sick children in hospital, they front advertisements and they market themselves as fine people.
This is acknowledged by the rugby union finding of ''serious misconduct'' this week. Smith has received a formal warning and is not assembling with the team for this weekend's match against Australia.
The damage to the reputation of the All Black jersey and ''commercial partners'' was cited in the decision.
As an All Black, and especially as a premier All Black, Smith sits in the upper branches of the New Zealand celebrity tree. With the honour and glory, as well as the money, comes scrutiny.
The age of the ubiquitous mobile-phone recording means All Blacks are in front of the lens just about wherever they go. They have to behave or they will be outed and pilloried.
In Smith's case, this was not the first incident. Two years ago a naked ''selfie'' emerged on social media.
Smith missed the last test in South Africa and, so it was said, came home on his own initiative.
He also, apparently, offered to stand aside for the Australia test this weekend, when attention will be on the attempt to set the record for the most successive victories by a tier-one rugby nation.
Given the obfuscation that comes from sporting organisations and coaches, scepticism is in order about how Smith's absence actually works.
Would not it have been better just to say Smith was stood down? Similarly, the modern-day PR-vetted sporting apology - tears and all - has to be questioned no matter how genuine it appears.
Only Smith himself will know how ''remorseful'' he actually is.
Whatever. Smith is doing his time and has suffered additionally from saturation publicity. He should, now, be welcomed back for the All Blacks' northern hemisphere tour next month.
His actions, while vulgar, are not in the same league as serious assaults and he should not be the scapegoat for other recent incidents.
It's time to move on, even if it will be hard to forget entirely the disabled toilet tryst.
