Not once in 2011 did Richie McCaw save a life. Not literally anyway.
He didn't invent anything that made life easier for New Zealanders and he didn't engage in any great philanthropic offerings.
McCaw (30) didn't do anything a great deal differently than he has for the past 10 years. In fact, if you're going to be absolutely blunt, he was never quite at his brilliant best in 2011.
Yet along the way, as he battled an insidious injury and the weight of public expectation, he came to embody the very essence of what it means to be a Good Kiwi Bloke - resilience, humility and pride.
McCaw, Rugby World Cup-winning captain, is The New Zealand Herald's New Zealander of the year.
It would be neat and tidy to say that McCaw's year began to unravel the same time that it did for thousands of other Cantabrians, on February 22 at 12.51pm, but he had already hit a speed bump three weeks earlier.
While doing a notorious yo-yo fitness test with the Crusaders on January 31, McCaw developed a nagging pain in his right foot. A week later he announced he would miss the first six weeks of the Super 15.
In a year when everything to do with our national sport - some would say national identity - revolved around the World Cup in September and October, it wasn't great news, but it was delivered so matter-of-factly that it seemed almost trivial.
Sitting in a soulless hotel conference room last week, performing his last round of media duties for the year, McCaw is all smiles as he eyes the cast that encases the same troubled appendage.
"Probably not," he says when asked if he would have continued playing had it been a normal season and not a World Cup campaign. "I would have taken time to sort out what was going on."
The foot never did heal properly. The screw that was inserted in February ended up causing more harm than good. By the time that became obvious, McCaw was left with Hobson's choice: play through some serious pain and risk doing long-term damage, or miss the World Cup and a shot at redemption.
Remember that by the time the final pool match with Canada rolled out, New Zealand's other "irreplaceable" player, Dan Carter, had already been ruled out, sparking a scarcely believable chain of events that saw the fourth-choice first five-eighth, Stephen Donald, slot the decisive penalty in the final.
"I'm just thankful it was good enough to carry on playing," McCaw says. "It hurt after each of the [World Cup] games. It took a couple of days to settle down before it was ready to go again, but I actually got to the point where I could play without thinking about it too much.
"Once the whistle went I found that adrenaline was a pretty good painkiller. The big fear I had was that the pain would get to the point where I was thinking about it while I was playing, but I never really got to there."
Forget for a minute the wider ramifications of hosting the World Cup, from the ephemeral economic benefits to other less tangible benefits. Really, its great success was that it reawakened the country's love affair with rugby.
Lots of things have combined over the past few decades that have made the code harder to love: The Springbok Tour, arrogance, professionalism, night rugby, too much rugby, wall-to-wall television coverage, player power and crass commercialism to name a few. Rugby had become less of a religion and more of a business.
The relationship between the fan and athlete had never been so one-sided.
Where once the All Blacks worked and lived among us as "ordinary" New Zealanders, they are now cosseted by the professional machine, only reachable if you were willing to spend money on tickets and pay-TV subscriptions.
It is McCaw's great skill in that although he is at the very apex of professional sport - he and Dan Carter are New Zealand's two highest-paid players and their media and public commitments are strictly vetted and controlled by agents and communications managers - he has retained a sense of normality.
His down-to-earth image is uncultivated. The casual she'll-be-right shrug of the shoulders when he is asked to assess problems, real or imagined, is not practiced.
McCaw is a popular chap, but even he sounds genuinely awestruck at the amount of goodwill that has been thrown his way since October 23.
"I've had a lot of letters and everyone that comes up has a 'well done' for me. It's blown me away really. People that wouldn't normally take a lot of interest in rugby were telling me they never even really watched the All Blacks, yet here they were watching other games and loving it."
Living in Christchurch, McCaw was acutely aware of the need for the lifting of the soul. He considers himself one of the lucky ones, in that rugby provided him with the perfect escape, and understood that the results of both the Crusaders and the All Blacks, while not affecting lives, could provide a small measure of solace.
"I think you saw that during the Super rugby campaign," he says. "People were pretty badly affected, but the one thing they got a bit of joy out of was seeing the Crusaders do pretty well.
"I knew they had the World Cup to look forward to, even though I feel they've missed out a bit, there's no doubt about that. But they still have a sense of pride about how well the All Blacks have done. Having that parade down there, I think it was hugely appreciated by everyone."
New Zealand avoided both England and South Africa at the World Cup, those two powers departing in the quarterfinals.
The Wallabies, too, were dispatched with a maximum of effort and minimum of fuss, 20-6 in the semifinals.
That left just the French. We say "just" because their poor form had only been matched by their great fortune. No team had ever won a World Cup after losing a match, let alone two as Les Bleus had in pool play.
It might not have been fait accompli, but it felt like it. We should have known better. With 30 minutes to go, New Zealand clinging to a one-point lead and France looking the team with more petrol left in the tank, dark clouds began hovering over the country.
Did dark thoughts start entering his head?
"It's difficult to assess that now because you know the reality," he says non-commitally.
"I realised going into the tournament that every team that has won it has gone through a situation where it could go either way. I expected going into the tournament that there'd be a point where we'd be in that situation.
"Going into the final, I thought to myself, 'We haven't really been tested yet in that sort of situation', so when it got to 20 minutes to go I thought, 'Now we are, and we're going to see whether all those experiences we'd been through, whether all the work we'd done together was going to come off'. Could we handle it?
"When I reflect on that last 20-minute period, we defended bloody well, but when we got the opportunity to have the ball with three or four minutes to go, it was pretty clinical what we did - nailed a scrum, held the ball, won the lineout. You know, of all the times to win a lineout, this was the time to get it right. That's what I found bloody satisfying. You couldn't get more pressure than at that time and we executed it."
There are a few things McCaw can now take for granted - his place among the greats of the game for one. He will end up with a few letters after his name, too, though he baulks at the idea of a knighthood, saying he would "leave that to Ted".
He's got a four-year NZRU contract in his pocket and McCaw believes he is still getting better as a player.
For the next few weeks at least, while his foot continues the healing process, it is time to relax.
