As an inspirational lead-up to the London Olympics, this true but fairytale story about Murray Halberg and Peter Snell and their legendary coach Arthur Lydiard succeeded in bringing back memories of those great moments in the 1960s, when two Kiwi athletes took us from sporting obscurity to the victory podium of Olympic gold.
One comment in the programme by the 73-year-old Snell caught my ear and took me back more than 50 years.
"I was living with a widow who was a Catholic", he said, referring to the boarding arrangement he had in Taylors Rd, Mt Albert, Auckland, when he first began endurance and stamina training with Lydiard and also kept up a day job in a quantity surveyor's office.
Taylors Rd was my patch, where as a 7-year-old I lived three doors from the widow, Ruby Ryan, who shared her villa home with her teenage son and daughter and her 21-year-old boarder, Snell.
As children we would run barefoot around the neighbourhood and would frequently see Snell at the end of the day, sweeping past his old school, Mt Albert Grammar, and jogging home to his digs, where his home-cooked meal of "meat and three veg" would be waiting for him.
In contrast to the youthful muscular athleticism of this future Olympic champion, Mrs Ryan cut a lonely figure as she limped home with her string-bag of groceries, a shy and dignified woman, carrying the burden of "making ends meet".
As children we occasionally visited her home.
Her son on one occasion annoyed the boarder by banging on his bedroom door and then running away.
My brother Eddie - the innocent party - was grabbed by the scruff of the neck by Snell, bursting out of his door to locate the culprit disturbing his studies.
As young children we had no sense there was anything special about our neighbourhood runner until one evening, in 1960, my younger sister Maggie and I were invited to Mrs Ryan's sitting-room for a little gathering with Snell to view his newly acquired Olympic gold medal from his Rome 800m success.
There it lay in its special case, beaming at us like treasure from King Solomon's mines.
Our own prize was to select a cream cake each before dawdling home with a medal memory we would never forget.
Snell left our street soon after, to go flatting for a time with his athlete mates and, of course, on to even greater international success, including double Olympic golds at Tokyo in 1964.
Unbeknown to him, I inherited a pair of his black thick-soled running shoes given to me by Mrs Ryan.
There they sat in our wash-house for years, perhaps beckoning me - as the Joe South hit song goes - to "walk a mile in my shoes".
Like Snell, we all left Taylors Rd eventually.
His running shoes were probably chucked out and old Mrs Ryan gracefully passed away.
It was 46 years before I got to meet New Zealand's "Sports Champion of the Century" again.
That was in Dunedin, in 2006, when he was the official guest at the New Zealand Masters Games.
It was not his first visit to the city.
For the Royal visit in 1963, Snell raced in the "royal mile" at the new all-weather track at the Caledonian Ground.
The Queen had never witnessed a sub-four minute mile and he did the deed for her, winningin 3min 58.6sec from his closest rival, John Davies.
In his 1965 memoir, No Bugles No Drums, Snell recalled how in the dressing room after the Dunedin race, he flopped down and burst into tears.
Physically unwell on the night, and low on reserves after a relentless schedule of running engagements, he had reached low ebb.
"Life can be fragile," he said many years later, when first diagnosed with heart problems.
So when we met all those years later, what did Snell and I talk about?
His landlady was one of the topics of conversation but the most important question he put to me was: "Do you remember those two good-looking girls that lived around the corner?"
I certainly did and their names readily came to mind because I, too, admired them from afar.
For me the greatest enduring memories of Snell can be found in the street that I lived in as a child, where the ordinary comings and goings of a suburban neighbourhood community became the backdrop for the extraordinary achievements of a quiet and introverted 21-year-old runner, perhaps dreaming for the first time of an Olympic gold.
• Tony Eyre is a Dunedin writer.
