Six weeks today, 15 men in white will run out on to Free State Stadium in Bloemfontein, their chests puffed with pride and their nerve ends jangling with adrenalin as South Africa open another chapter in a playing history that is, for the most part, as noble as any in the game.
The Springboks will be in white as a courtesy to our green-shirted guests from Ireland and there will hardly be a rugby fan in either country who won't have an ear glued to a radio or frozen to the glass square. This, after all, is a Test match - it's so much more than a game and the deeds performed this day will not go into history but into legend.
Ireland opened their last tour to South Africa at the same ground and almost on the same date six years ago, and there was a whiff of cordite in the air - and not just from the parachutists' flares through which it was just about possible to discern Stefan Terblanche thundering in for the first of his record-equalling four tries in the opening moments.
Ireland sailed close to the wind of violent play that day with Keith Wood flattening Gary Teichmann and Irish captain Paddy Johns ensuring that another debutant, Gaffie du Toit, was properly bloodied in international rugby. See what I mean? Legend.
A week later the Boks sought and gained retribution as well as two yellow cards (Otto and Dalton) as Woods was forced out of the match injured and the Irish were nilled, 33-zip.
Later that year the Boks equalled the record for successive Test wins in Dublin with Bob Skinstad in sublime form, running 50 metres for one try and making another glorious break for Joost van der Westhuizen to seal the win.
Eighty-six years earlier on a frozen Lansdowne Road the Boks scored the biggest victory in Test rugby (38-0) with Free State's Boetie McHardy scoring the first test hat trick by a Springbok. The record stood until the Springboks eclipsed it at Murrayfield in 1951 (44-0).
The history lesson is by way of a reminder to players and supporters - if not selectors and administrators - that being a Springbok actually means something. The 22 that are named by Jake White for the first Test are not just earning another payday, they are being asked to contribute to a legacy.
If that feeling has been battered out of them by the events of the past two or three seasons, you can't blame them.
There's not much special about being one of 71 men to be invited to play for a team in just two seasons; there's nothing glorious about being part of record defeats by France, Scotland, England and New Zealand nor of the two biggest defeats in history. And how noble is it to be filmed having an egg broken over one's head?
But this is a new season and a new coach who, like Rudolf Straeuli, believes deeply that being a Springbok means more than occupying a place in a rugby team. One hopes that "events" won't prise White's hands from that central tenet as they so easily did his predecessor.
Clyde Rathbone is currently weighing up the difference between what it means to be a Springbok and a Wallaby. Superficially, there is probably no choice.
Australia has been good to him: He has been well-coached, well-paid and well-nurtured and has emerged this season as one of the outstanding right wings in the competition - certainly the best South African qualified.
It has helped to be playing alongside Larkham, Giteau, Mortlock and Roff and a Wallaby cap will be his at some point in June - if only to make him ineligible to further overtures from South Africa.
He will have fulfilled his dream of playing Test rugby and he'll be proud to have pulled on the jersey of one of rugby's leading nations. But it won't have been a Springbok jersey.
And Rathbone knows better than most what that means - there's a picture of him at the 2002 under-21 world championships in which he is captured in South Africa's moment of triumph, pointing to the emblem on his myrtle green jersey.
The badge had meaning to him then and that's not something everyone can toss with the biltong and drowors into the quarantine bins on arrival at Sydney Airport.
If the pull of the Springbok returns Rathbone to these shores his teammates would do well to re-learn a lesson that informs the play of the Brumbies (Owen Finegan apart) as much as any other.
It is the obvious one that violent and ill-disciplined play are utterly redundant in professional rugby - no matter how severe the provocation. The penalties can be more severe than a suspension; have, for instance, AJ Venter or Corné Krige cost their side a place in the semifinals.
Sad to say, their side-by-side citings have reinforced the Springboks' modern reputation as a dull and brutish team. But the reputation is just that - modern.
The Springbok side that recorded South Africa's first overseas victory in 1906 against Ireland in Belfast built a reputation as a free-running and sportsmanlike team. And the side that next lost in Europe in 1965 was a few months short of a speech by Prime Minister Verwoerd, rejecting Maori All Blacks that signalled the beginning of the end for first age of Springbok rugby.
We are now 13 seasons into the second age and it has not been a glorious time - 1995 and 1998 apart. Now would be a good time to recall a nobler heritage against a worthy opponent and collectively recognise that the next Springbok 15 has a responsibility to the past as much as the present.