Every Saturday morning, as if to remind me of my increasing age and armchair inertia, hordes of tiny soccer players with limitless energy scamper all over the Oval across the road from our house.
I had been watching them fascinated for some time, and two weeks ago, I went over for a closer look.
The kids were even tinier than they had seemed from the window.
"What grade is this?" I asked one of the many parents on the sideline.
"Four to 6 years," she replied.
Crikey.
I started at 9.
And yet there were kids here who understood you passed the ball to someone else, all the throw-ins were correctly taken, albeit occasionally with inordinate time delays, and some kids could both dribble and beat a player.
My memories of junior soccer are less than fond, possibly because I was useless.
And because I was useless, I was made the goalkeeper.
No kid wants to be the goalkeeper if he is on sixpence a goal from a doting grandparent.
We also played so early on Saturday morning it was dark when we left home.
And bitingly cold.
The mud in my Ellis Park goal-mouth was always glass-hard shards of ice in the first half.
At the Oval, they began mid-morning, and there were no goalkeepers.
Teams played up to seven a side, lining up at kickoff in a straight line, the formation known behind cupped hands at Fifa as 7-0.
There was one exception, a first-year game between two Maori Hill teams, where Maori Hill Yellow Bibs lined up in 2-5.
Defence!
It paid off, they managed an All Whites-like nil-all draw.
"One of our best results of the season," a visibly excited parent confided to me on the sideline.
The two at the back for Yellow Bibs were girls.
In keeping with the physicality of playground politics at this age - girls are often bigger and tougher - central defenders are natural positions for them.
Pretty much every team I saw had a girl at the back who could whang the ball right up the park - the style made so famous by Elton John's Watford teams under Graham Taylor.
I moved to a second-year grade game, attracted by the white colours of my old club Roslyn-Wakari.
They were playing a nimble little blue-clad team from Mornington, and Roslyn were doing it hard.
Advice came from all over, not only the parents, but from the two referees, who are also the two coaches.
But no tempers are lost, the tawdry sideline tales of enraged rugby parents this season were not evident at the Oval this day.
And none of these kids have yet learnt soccer's own bête noir, the anguished shrieking and turf-threshing when tackled.
At what age do they learn this awful thing?We lost a lot of games 3-1 when I played tenth and ninth grade for Roslyn-Wakari, and Roslyn lost this one 3-1 as well.
The Roslyn coach consoled his team.
He mentioned that there had been a little too much looking at the sky, but he was positive and praiseworthy.
He made Will the player of the day.
Will won a pineapple lump.
But the enduring memory at the Oval that morning was the faces of the kids.
So many of them already looked like tiny adults, like they will look 20 years on, when they have adopted Ryan Nelson cragginess, the despair from a thousand incorrect refereeing decisions and hundreds of games lost when nearly won.
You could almost tell now what kind of players they will become, especially the ones who had the glint.
Like Mornington's Ollie, as small as anyone on the field, who burst into the open to drill home a cross first-time from 20 metres and ran back down the length of the field entranced, gliding his arms in horizontal ecstasy.
It was the purity of the beautiful game in compelling and nascent miniature.
From a 6- year-old boy.
Perfect.
Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.
