KEY POINTS:
It's time for the Black Sticks to cowboy, or cowgirl, up.
While we take pot shots at our cricketers and bag the All Blacks for their failure to bring home a certain piece of silverware, our hockey teams have quietly staked a claim as the country's biggest underachievers.
Millions of Sparc dollars, your dollars, have been poured into hockey and there is no other Olympic discipline that can say they have received so much from their country to deliver so little.
While the sport is happy to dine out on the magic of Montreal, where New Zealand snatched gold in a 1-0 thriller against arch-rival Australia, they are not so keen to acknowledge that is the single notable achievement in 13 combined Olympic campaigns.
Adding to Olympic frustrations is the unpalatable fact that six Commonwealth Games campaigns - where powerhouse nations like The Netherlands, Germany, Spain, Korea and Argentina are absent - have landed a measly silver and bronze.
Yet running a hockey programme is not cheap.
In the two years leading up to the Athens Olympics New Zealand Hockey received $1.4 million for its high-performance programme. In the years since, that has ratcheted up to $4.95m in both programme investment, PEGs and direct athlete support grants.
That's a fair wodge of cash for... well, what exactly?
The women's results in the modern era - their first campaign was Los Angeles, 1984 - have been particularly disappointing given the talent they have had to work with.
There can be no excuses this time given they qualified early and did not have to go through the brutal winner-takes-all tournament the men did earlier this year.
But with the women it all too often depends what mood they turn up in, and that shouldn't be seen as having a dig at gender stereotypes, just a gentle dig at the perceived culture of this team.
A cabal of senior players including Lizzy Igasan and Jaimee Claxton, nee Provan, did not like previous coach Ian Rutledge's rather brash women-management style and in the end they won. Rutledge, an excellent technical coach, was banished back to his Australian homeland and the more user-friendly Kevin Towns was shifted from a stagnating men's team to the women's - from an outsider's perspective an all-too-cosy arrangement.
For an essentially amateur sport, women's hockey seems riven with the sort of petty jealousies and power plays normally associated with pros (for example, the 1992 Barcelona campaign was clouded by ugly rumours of a gay-straight split in the team). As Rutledge would testify, personality issues are still playing too big a part.
But this team, given the coach they want and the taxpayer investment, have no excuses. Beijing is their time to deliver on the promise. Nothing but a medal will suffice.
The sport has good friends in high places. The Maister name is familiar with both New Zealand hockey history and the New Zealand Olympic Committee; in the days before he was head of Sparc, Peter Miskimmin was a long-time national representative.
It is no surprise they have risen in their careers, hockey folk pride themselves on being a little more cerebral than most sports.
These smart men and women, then, should be acutely aware of this simple equation: loads of investment no return = hard questions.
