Photos: Transtasman test - 10 to watchKEY POINTS:
There should never have been anything weirder in sport than the triumphs and tragedy of the first Kiwi side but a century of league has thrown that theory out of the window.
When the entrepreneurial Albert Henry Baskiville died in a Brisbane hospital just days after inspiring the New Zealand side to victory in its first test against Australia in 1908, New Zealand league lost its last brilliant administrator.
The Wellington postal clerk became the posthumous father of Southern Hemisphere league by organising the extraordinary All Golds tour and even defied the game's future traditions by returning a profit.
Baskiville was so diligent that he hardly played during the English leg and was left knackered, a fate that has befallen a few modern day equivalents but only because they blew fuses in pursuit of the dessert trolley.
Even the Aussies wanted young Albert to come over and fire up the league revolution, but influenza did Baskiville in after he had scored a brilliant try to inspire a New Zealand victory in Sydney.
You could write a book about it and someone did. You could make a film about it, and maybe someone will one day.
One hundred years later, a match at the historic Sydney Cricket Ground to celebrate a century of this crazy code is selling like cold pies and the great new Kiwi wunderkind is spreading his future as thin as those test spectators.
League is 100 years old but has never lost a youthful delight in causing a ruckus.
No wonder the State of Origin clash between Queensland and New South Wales is league's best ticket because everyone knows where they stand in the annual stoush between interstate mates. Ribs are divided because loyalties ain't in the State of O.
The chances of a Queenslander turning out for New South Wales or vice versa are the same as Harbhajan Singh applying for Australian citizenship.
Unfortunately, international league struggles to match the Origin carnival in desperation and standards of qualification.
A wee birth certificate mix-up a couple of years ago stole the headlines but Nathan Fien's momentarily forgotten granny isn't the only missing link in league test credibility.
For every rallying cry from the likes of Roy Asotasi and David Kidwell, there is an inevitable squawk from one of the new brigade determined to put the jump into test jumper.
Loyalty is a two-way deal and players have been done in by clubs under the NRL's salary cap system but that still doesn't account for Sonny Bill Williams' pre-test mutterings. Okay, so Sonny feels burnt by Willie Mason and the Bulldogs, but that is hardly the Kiwis' fault.
Yet fresh from revealing he wanted to become an All Black, the superstar forward even suggested he might quit the Kiwis one day and turn out for Samoa.
What a thrill and none of us can wait for this cataclysmic moment and all the tabloid layered roads that will lead to it.
That's the boy Sonny Bill. With six glorious tests under the belt you sure have earned the right to look elsewhere.
Who needs to die for a single league cause when the real name of the game is keeping your options open. Not happy with merely introducing another sport into the centenary test build-up, he's managed to pull another country out of the hat. Magic.
What really hurts is that Sonny Bill comes out of the heartland, Auckland league's world of tangled rivalries and friendships that has endured but not really survived the onslaught of flourishing professionalism.
Frank Pritchard went down this same All Black-obsessed track a couple of years ago, just days before he gave the Auckland-born but Queensland-raised object of Kiwi ire Karmichael Hunt a good smashing at Suncorp Stadium. In case you've forgotten, fearless Frank and the rest of the Kiwis were given an even bigger walloping by Australia that night.
Look fellas, if you want to become All Blacks and/or talk your contract prospects up, all good and fine - it's a free world.
But leave it out during the test build-ups so the rest of us can still swim in our league illusions.
* From the strange but true file ... 14 years into the life of the Auckland NRL club, the Warriors have produced just two players for Steve Kearney's first Kiwi 19-man squad and neither one of them hails from the Queen City. Little Lance Hohaia is a Waikato product and Simon Mannering was born in Napier and emerged out of Nelson. Go the provinces.
