The All Black tour of Europe will be new world meeting old in every sense. The French, English and Irish will not only worry whether the lemons were cut just right for the committee men's gin and tonics, they will endlessly fret and obsess about set-piece, territory and possession.
Rugby Northern Hemisphere-style is still very much a small-scale re-enactment of World War I: full-scale carnage on the front lines with everyone happy to advance inch by painful inch.
But this is not the rugby of the All Blacks. They have vastly different ideas about what really matters these days.
Their rugby is more - to stick with the military analogies - guerrilla warfare. It's not about attrition, digging in for the long haul and hoping to survive for longer.
It is about ruthless smash-and-grab raids. It is about applying pressure across the field with and without the ball. It is about posing a triple threat - passing, running and kicking.