The first two weekends have produced an extraordinary amount of captivating rugby – drama, spectacle, ridiculously polished skill sets and tries by the bucket-load.
There hasn’t been a dud game yet, no horrible mismatch or sense of inevitability about any fixture, and the three teams without a win so far, will all feel they should, and probably could have snatched one had they just taken one of their multiple chances a little less frantically.
Up north they used to mock Super Rugby’s golden era as pyjama football – claim it was all tonic and no gin, and with each game this weekend gone yielding an average of 75 points, such accusations could be rekindled.
But let them. And let them stew in their own turgid business of trench warfare because anyone who saw England box-kicking Scotland and their own fan base to a slow and painful death at Twickenham would take one look at Super Rugby and say: “Yes please.”
And, maybe too, it is time for the lamenting to stop about the absent South Africans and for Super Rugby to be judged on what it brings as an entertainment product, and not for what it is missing as a development tool for the All Blacks.
Besides, it may well turn out that some of the narrative about Super Rugby lacking physical edge without the South Africans is a little overdone as there doesn’t appear to be a shortage of power athletes roaming around in 2025 or any sense that scrums are just a means to restart the game.
There’s been enough set-piece crunch and breakdown ferocity these past two weeks to feel that All Blacks forwards coach Jason Ryan will be sleeping soundly, while every rugby purist on the planet would have been in their happy place watching the Chiefs’ second-half performance on Friday night.
It was rugby’s version of the total football the Dutch national team played in the 1970s – a seamless and wondrous knitting together of soft and hard skills, forwards and backs interchanging like they knew each other’s roles as well as they did their own.
It was mesmerising and even if the Chiefs season implodes in the next few weeks – a seemingly unlikely proposition – they can look at those 40 minutes and be sure they sold the world the most convincing proof that rugby can make it as an entertainment product.
With the sun beating down in Napier and the palm trees poking into the frame at McLean Park, the Drua made it look like they were back in Fiji at times, scoring a try early in the second half that involved four outrageous offloads and will be a contender for best of the season.
And what about all those fresh faces packed into the Zoo at Forsyth Barr Stadium? The country’s brightest minds, their livers screaming on the last day of O-Week, treated to a show of defiance by a Highlanders team that has found that little bit of missing resilience.
For many, it may have been a drunken blur, but they will be back – hooked on the adrenaline rush that comes as part of witnessing live sport at its best.
Super Rugby lost a generation, but now in its ill-fitting 11-team format that everyone thought would be a disaster, it is re-engaging fans everywhere.
No doubt the halo will slip from the Force, the Blues will surge back into contention and come the play-offs we may well see the same old Kiwi heavyweights dominate.
But for now, there is a sense of the improbable being entirely possible and that we are living in an age of rugby enlightenment – a high-skilled, free-flowing renaissance that has wound the clock back to the good old days.
