John Lapsley begins a short summer season of articles - in which Opinion page contributors reveal their habits, hobbies and minor obsessions - with a sad confession: he is a compulsive Black Caps spectator.
I feel no special longing to watch them bowl or drop catches. I just need to see them bat - to start my day filled with beamish hope, to be teased by early modest success, and to then sit blackly on the sofa enduring the ritual of the meek being put down in another batting collapse.
An ashamed part of me admits that being a willing spectator to this is no better than enjoying a pie in the members' stand of the Coliseum during a Lions versus Christians meet.
It's an event where you can't slip out for a fag with your mate Nero, because everything happens too quickly.
The Christian openers march to the centre, take block, and before they can appeal to the third umpire, the Lions have taken lunch.
Any psychiatrist worth his couch will diagnose repetitive Black Cap watching as a symptom of obsessive compulsive disorder.
Perpetually checking the score in the hope they're amassing centuries is as logical as the obsessive returning home eight times to check he locked the door and put the key under the mat.
So how did this happen?
I've previously explained (in this august journal, actually) that when I was 10 my father thoughtlessly took me to watch New Zealand "play" England on the day our team got bowled out for 26.
Eight batsmen scored no better than 1.
In those cruel moments, my child's mind received and stored the knowledge that, for a Kiwi batsman, any score better than one was an accomplishment.
This makes enduring collapses more bearable because when any New Zealand batsman eclipses one, I hoard each extra run like a miser filling a jar with rare pennies (another OCD symptom).
"Please God," I beg. "Another nine runs and we've achieved double figures."
Arundhati Roy was contemplating Black Cap supporters when in the The God of Small Things she wrote: "Seek joy in the saddest places ... Never look away."
This is how, if we dig deeply, we discover satisfaction watching an opener like Tim McIntyre labour for 80 minutes over a solidly compiled seven.
Test cricket's television ratings aren't wonderful but this isn't the direct result of insipid batting.
Many Kiwis don't watch because while very young they were unwittingly cured of the required obsessive compulsive disorder.
Its most efficacious treatment is convulsive shock therapy, a milder version of the electric chair.
Now ask yourself: "Is there a single Kiwi country kid who hasn't taken part in a 'How long can you hold on to the electric fence' contest?"
Everyone grabbed and held tight, convulsing in their gumboots. And so, much as it didn't work for me personally, a child's game of dare ensured the future mental health of the nation.
When Gordon McLauchlan condemned New Zealand's blandness in his book The Passionless People, he didn't understand what had really happened.
These electric bolts also subdue a head full of other psychoses. So we weren't born passionless; we just got fried and became well.
Living in Australia for years gave me a period of remission because, except on Black Caps visits, my de facto home team was one of the game's great sides. I saw a huge attitudinal difference.
New Zealand cricket could bear a loss if it was "respectable". But "respectable" and "loss" aren't words that fit together in an Australian sentence.
When England spent two decades being thrashed by Australia, their cricket writers handled it by allowing grudging respect to a people they portrayed as grim but effective colonial toughnuts.
It was beyond their ken to imagine convicts and colonials touched by a beautiful brilliance.
Although, to be fair, you need a special perspective to see Shane Warne as Mozart, or to know that poets, too, like Ricky Ponting, may pick their noses when fielding.
When I returned here, I noticed two particular things in sport.
Black Caps batsmen were still as reliable as a policeman's testimony. And the haka had triumphed. It was once a limp routine performed by All Blacks who looked like talent quest singers who'd forgotten their words.
Now we have artistic haka composers, and about the only national outfits who abstain are the chess team and the Black Caps.
Bowlers don't need haka training, because any decent roar for a dodgy lbw is doubtless as good as Te Rauparaha's finest.But I'm not sure how a Black Caps haka would stiffen the batting.
However, I do know that performed en masse to the members' pavilion at Lord's, it would be a fine way of collapsing us out of the Commonwealth, and bowling on to the republic.
- John Lapsley is an Arrowtown writer.
