The theory was great: Go overseas, then come home for the All Black dream, writes Gregor Paul. The reality turned out much different.
When Harvard's best graduates were promising to change the financial world with their complex sub-prime refinancing, New Zealand's player agents sold a vision just as radical.
They talked of a future when All Blacks would head to Europe earlier in their career, sample all that such a diverse continent offers before returning to New Zealand and resuming the serious business of building a test legacy.
Both concepts have proven disastrous. Four years on and the global economy is still on its knees and last week the danger of believing time away from New Zealand rugby can easily be recovered was shown to be painfully wrong.
Luke McAlister, once such a thrilling prospect, bungled his way through 80 minutes of provincial rugby barely looking half the player he was. That electric step and blistering acceleration has been lost and, with it, his confidence.
It wasn't a one-off. Since his return from Sale last year, McAlister has been a brick in a window frame. England stole his spark. He was stuck in the gym, exposed to endless contact sessions and forced to adapt to set-piece football played on soft grounds.
On muddy fields across the Motherland, bits of McAlister were imperceptibly shed - shaved like a hard cheese until there wasn't much left. That's what rugby in those parts does - it takes everything. It's a tortuously long season and to the resilient go the spoils.
When he first returned, injury was the crutch that explained his limping form. But he's been back for 16 months and still nothing. It's time to face facts - his decision to leave New Zealand at 24 was the wrong one and the stagnation of McAlister's career should serve as a warning to others not to follow this experimental path.
Had he stayed, McAlister, instead of failing to stand out for North Harbour, might now be staring at 50 test caps and the kind of reputation that could set him up for life.
Everyone remembers his yellow card in the World Cup quarter-final and, with that, he holds a tainted place in the nation's sub-conscious - the stigma of blame hovering, never quite attached.
Yet it was McAlister who was the most potent threat prior to that card, itself an odd decision from a referee derided for vacating his own body and leaving just the shell.
It was McAlister who scored the All Blacks' try. It was McAlister, not Daniel Carter, who was backline orchestrator that night before the customary team meltdown.
Flaws in his game were more a consequence of exuberance and desire to make things happen. But he was a player of interest in 2007, a player very definitely on the rise, as with experience and maturity the foibles no doubt would have been eradicated.
In stark contrast, Ma'a Nonu chose the route McAlister shunned and how the latter must wonder what could have been. Nonu didn't make it to France in 2007 - his game was deemed erratic and his attitude suspect. A bleak future seemingly awaited, yet he stayed, sweated until his mascara ran and refined his game to the point where no one wants to start a test without him.
At the end of 2006, the All Black coaches saw McAlister and Conrad Smith as their best midfield combination. Now, Nonu and Smith have become the new Little and Bunce and McAlister is all but forgotten. It's as if he left New Zealand a VHS, only to come home a Betamax.
If ever there was an advert for the doomed prospects of leaving New Zealand so young, McAlister is it. The game here waits for no man. It is fast, on-top-of-the-ground rugby and young men leave at their risk.
The war of attrition in Europe doesn't equip anyone to play the game back here. Even tight forwards might find it is not so easy to leave and come back.
There was a desperate effort to persuade Carl Hayman to come home but that was mostly driven by what he had once been and the uncertainty about what was available in New Zealand.
Maybe New Zealand dodged a bullet in Hayman going to Toulon. Could anyone really be sure he still had what it took to play test football? The scrummaging part, probably, but could he keep up elsewhere having trudged around for the previous three years?
It's all too easy to underestimate the difference in pace, intensity and skill level requirements between the two hemispheres. So much of what is seen at the top level in New Zealand is ingrained.
"I think we are fortunate that our breeding ground, which is the major secondary schools, they play that [running] kind of football," says coach Graham Henry.
"If you watch the New Zealand under-20s play, they play a ball-in-hand game. It is our natural game. It hasn't always been our natural game.
"If you watch Hamilton Boys' play Rotorua Boys' or watch St Bedes play Otago Boys', you will see a ball-in-hand game of rugby. I am sure you will see the same in Australia.
"But if you got to watch London Boys' Grammar versus Cardiff Boys' Grammar - you will see a kicking game, a driving game. I think it is in-bred and I think we are lucky that we have that sort of background.
"If you look at Super Rugby, it's a ball-in-hand game. It has been criticised by so-called experts in other parts of the world as not real rugby. But our teams want to play that type of rugby. It excites our guys to play that sort of football."
To come out of the system, as McAlister did, even at a relatively young age, is a bit like taking a mortgage holiday.
It may seem like a good idea and easy enough to make up the ground, but it really isn't.
Aaron Mauger wanted to come back after his time at Leicester but was forced into retiring - a consequence, perhaps, of so much training and contact in England.
Chris Jack has underwhelmed since his return from the UK and South Africa.
To date, the only player to successfully return from an overseas venture is Leon MacDonald. He had a year in Japan in 2004 before resuming his All Black career. Troy Flavell also won All Black caps after a stint in Japan but was never quite the player the selectors thought he could be.
There has to be some sympathy for McAlister that he has become the test case to prove the theory was bunkum. But his personal sacrifice should ensure that any other young players heading off to Europe are clear in their minds that the road back is long, torturous and almost impossible to scale.
