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The year just gone will go down hereabouts as the year I hit my first six at cricket. Yes, I know Katie Taylor will be upset not to get sporting moment of the year in our house, but my shot was far longer in the making than her gold medal.
It was a chilly evening in early summer (and they didn't get any less chilly as the season progressed). It was overcast, and there was a sharp wind.
The usual ragbag assortment of journalists and other ne'er do wells that make up the Independent team were playing against a team drawn from the staff of Trinity College.
For once, we had them where we wanted them. We were coasting to an easy victory, needing only a handful of runs with plenty of wickets in hand.
However, in cricket, there is really no such thing as an easy victory. And our team in particular has a long history of pressing the self-destruct button in such situations.
At Oxford some years ago, two friends met and decided to form a team specialising in heroic failure. They called themselves the Captain Scott XI, after the Antarctic adventurer who just failed to be the first man to the South Pole.
The Captain Scott XI would deliberately lose matches to maintain their ethos. They would throw away their wickets or let the ball go over the boundary accidentally on purpose.
They tried to take their belief that playing, not winning, is the important thing to extraordinary lengths. But after a while, some of the team began to ask their captain if they couldn't win just one match now and then, for variety's sake.
This led to a split in the team, with the original Captain Scott XI continuing on their losing ways, and a breakaway XI actually trying to win games.
Both teams, by the way, have books written about them (Rain Men by Marcus Berkmann, and Penguins Stopped Play by Harry Thompson), making them the Bloomsbury set of cricket.
The Independent team has absorbed something of the Captain Scott spirit. We lose matches we should have won. We allow other teams off the hook. We lack the killer instinct, or even the kick 'em in the shins instinct.
Next year, our team will celebrate 25 years of losing by small margins. We have played the Trinity team once or twice in every one of those years, and have beaten them only twice in all that time.
Now, on that chilly summer's evening at The High School in Rathgar, a third victory was at hand.
But something was happening to our batsmen. They tensed up. The pressure got to them. They became stiff and awkward, prodding defensively for long periods and then flailing wildly.
I was batting at one end, and watched as teammates came and went at the other. Runs, which had flowed from our bats early in the innings, dried to a trickle.
Confidence was growing in the Trinity ranks. There had been a hangdog look to them earlier; now they were high-fiving each other.
Cricket is a game of statistics: runs required, run-rates and wickets in hand. Now, with the sun disappearing behind the trees at square leg, we needed 10 runs to win off 18 deliveries.
Now, I have spent 25 years trying to hit a six (where the ball flies over the boundary without hitting the ground first). Some attempts have landed just short of the boundary rope, while others have soared straight up in the air, giving the wicket-keeper an easy catch.
Sometimes, I have swung so hard at the ball that I thought I had dislocated my shoulder. Once – and I have never told this to a living soul before – I actually hit my own foot with the bat.
The Trinity bowler ran up to the wicket and let go of the ball. It was a slow delivery, and short, pitching about middle-and-leg. I swung at it with might and main.
And this time, the planets were aligned, the gods smiled, the Earth tilted on its axis at the right time, and I hit the ball out of the sweet spot of the bat.
It soared behind square leg, where the boundary is furthest from the wicket, and disappeared into a hedge. The Trinity fielder over whose head it passed was kind enough to raise both hands aloft in the cricketing signal for a six.
The Trinity stranglehold on the game was broken, the pressure was released and we went on to win the match.
I'm sure Katie Taylor won't begrudge me. She trained for four years for her moment of glory; I waited a quarter of a century for mine.
drobbins@independent.ie
