KEY POINTS:
I can tell you from bitter experience that those guys who pulled the shirt off (and for some of them, that was the last time they will ever do it) in the utter silence of that stunned, disbelieving Cardiff dressing room will feel it deeper and for longer. They will carry that defeat with them to their rugby graves and I don't envy them their burden.
I'm not going to put it on the ref - it was our mental hardness, or lack of it, that cost us.
We didn't even play that badly. We should have left the French for dead by halftime. We didn't close them out and we paid dearly. In the second half, it all unravelled.
Between 40 and 60 minutes, we lost our grip, our cool and our focus. Decision-making became inconsistent; the fabric and cohesion of the All Black structure frayed and fell away; momentum stalled.
On the face of it, the resting and the rotation sounded sensible. The 48-month build-up was hypnotically, metronomically on the money.
The squad purred into the tournament like a sleek black Rolls Royce. The group stages presented no problems. It all seemed so meticulous and organised - and then came Cardiff.
It takes more to win the Webb Ellis trophy than perfect preparation. In the single minutes when it mattered, the All Blacks found themselves in a crisis for which they could not have been prepared under the current set-up.
Their bodies were prepared, their minds weren't. They stuttered when the first real pressure was applied.
Look at how the players were handled over the last four years, and compare it to what happens in the Northern Hemisphere.
The All Blacks have been protected from the excesses of brutal bruising club competition - 22 players were taken out of the first half of the Super 14 to undergo a conditioning programme.
There were no warm-up tests; individuals played in single games and were rested for the next one; the squad had little exposure to winner-takes-all sudden death formats.
Compare that to, say England captain Martin Corry. He plays a Six Nations test match and then, bloodied and bruised, has to go to work - training and playing for his club. There is no rest, no respite. He backs up with another game.
I am saying to Northern Hemisphere friends that Carl Hayman will leave Europe a better player - because he will be subjected to a must-win rugby scenario. There will be no extended break in the club championships - too much rides on it.
The All Blacks' approach had a big upside in terms of how fresh, honed and focused the team were physically but it now seems that this approach was detrimental in terms of the mental resilience of the team.
Having said that, let's not do what we are so good at - chucking the baby out with the bath water. Graham Henry is still the best coach available to the All Blacks; Steve Hansen and Wayne Smith the best coaching team. If there's anyone better, tell me who they are. Plus we have remarkable talent for them to take to the next level - provided they are willing to honestly address their shortcomings.
The questions for the All Blacks now are: How do we expose our players to this type of situation more regularly? How do we get them to handle it individually and collectively?
How do we get our team to use that fear of failure to generate the strength, power, resolve and belief (as the French did) to close out results, rather than turn us into the rabbits-in-headlights as during those last tortuous minutes in Cardiff?
We have to build something from the ruins of this World Cup.
We won't move forward just by talking about coaches and refs, grey shirts and holidays and all that stuff, because maybe we might have done one or two things differently but overall I think we were all pretty much of the same opinion this squad was physically and technically ready.
Our demise came about not because of our technique, but because of our psyche.
And in four years, we'll be back, where the ghosts of previous failures will rise up to meet us - bigger, and more compelling after Cardiff.
Everyone will be looking for the Kiwis to choke. People will insist we can't do it.
Our challenge now lies in facing down those fears and in enabling our players to handle the searing white heat of sudden-death rugby, to develop the steel and inner strength to feed off fear of failure and to manage the situation - to turn fear into results.
We do that not by discarding rotation and reconditioning but by using them to complement the identification and playing of our best teams in competitions, like the Super 14, and in test matches.
We have to get away from this overwhelming focus on the World Cup and get back to playing test-by-test matches, using our best players consistently so that we grow our combinations and the players' ability to draw on each other when the blowtorch is applied.
The biggest game of all now has to be played in our heads. Every step of the way, I will be cheering on what I still passionately believe to be the best rugby team on earth. Go the All Blacks.
