OPINION:
Losing is an art, like everything else. The All Blacks do it exceptionally well. The All Blacks do it so it feels like hell.
Art is the extreme edge of the human mind and the All Blacks are walking that edge into a dark unknown. Marlon Brando's great speech in Apocalypse Now provides the breathy soundtrack: "I watched a snail crawl along the edge of a straight razor. That's my dream. That's my nightmare. Crawling, slithering, along the edge of a straight razor and surviving." But the All Blacks are not surviving. They are losing.
Losing is so much more interesting than winning. Anyone can win at something. It's a common experience, something routine and to be expected. The celebrations of a winning team are nothing to look at because you've seen it all before - the fizzing champagne, the coach held aloft, the boring hand gestures. Winning has such a narrow range. But the depressions of a losing team are deep and varied and always shocking to witness. Behold the pale, baffled faces of the All Blacks, losing.
Losing is something to savour, to remember. Right now the All Blacks are creating history. They are smashing the record books. Things have never been this bad before and the dark thrill, the amazing prospect, is that things could even get worse. This is something to pass down to the generations to come. "Were you there," kids as yet unborn will one day regard their grandparents in awe and ask, "when the All Blacks began losing?"