For starters, there was the New Zealand-Australia World Cup game on the telly, the biggest game for 20 years they were saying, get in the beer and chips.
But this was not even one of the big things, really.
There was the Tally Ho concert in the Dunedin Town Hall, a concert germinated in a long, huge bubbling bubble bath in the early 1990s - all great ideas form first in huge bubbling bubble baths; I believe penicillin was discovered in this way - and which was finally brought to fruition 20 years later.
That's a lot of fruitioning.
Then there was the mighty racehorse Aotearower, in which I have a significant one-two-hundredth share, racing for her first win after four narrow and gallant seconds, surely Saturday would be the day, surely after Saturday I could be introduced to people at prestigious dinner parties as a successful racehorse owner, a desire I had clutched in both hands since birth.
And finally, the biggest of them all, the 10th anniversary of my kidney transplant, a Big Thing that quite simply saved my life.
There is no bigger thing than that.
Came the Big Saturday and, unfortunately, Aotearower was withdrawn from her Hastings race by breeder and part-owner Sir Patrick Hogan.
He, Aotearower, could handle a much tougher field in the Sunline Vase at Ellerslie tomorrow. Hmmm.
Wonderful that Sir Patrick thinks the horse is that good, but as Kylie Minogue is frequently heard to whisper, a win is a win.
I was at least able to watch New Zealand remove Australia for an insultingly low score before my sister arrived for dinner, and while the cricket was chair-pounding, my sister deserved serious attention because she had given me the kidney.
I am nothing if not a man who never fails not to understand the hierarchy of life and all its twists and turns.
Some people wait 20 years for a kidney, if they live that long, so it can never be underestimated what it feels like to be just offered one, bang, the minute the cry goes out, like being offered a ride home or a chocolate.
A few other people had offered me a kidney after the sixth wine.
I never rang them up the next day.
That would be a tough call to receive.
Oh, hi Roy, last night?
Of course I remember, excuse me?
I said WHAT??
But my sister hadn't had six wines; she just wanted to save my life.
Would I have offered such a thing?
To anyone?
I am lucky in that I have no working organs to even offer a fruit fly, so I can say yes, of course, and squirm uncomfortably when nobody is looking.
I remember that week in the isolation room at Christchurch Hospital after the operation.
Working out how many steps would equate to a kilometre and then walking the required number of steps that was 5km, clutching a catheter in one hand, ignoring the pain, determined to get out of that room in less than the 10 days they said it would take, longer because I was diabetic.
I was out in five, limping and sore, but out.
So yes, The Big Saturday.
As I sat in the Dunedin Town Hall last Saturday night in my cheap Vietnamese suit, gazing down on more musical talent than there are grains of sand on Middle Beach, listening to the vocal wonder of Anna, Molly, Kylie and Lani as the backing singers 20 Feet From Stardom behind Martin Phillipps on the sublime Submarine Bells, I wasn't wondering if New Zealand were getting it done back home on the telly, or whether Aotearower should have raced earlier that day, won, and made it a night to drink six wines.
I was thinking how incredible, how almost beyond words, almost but not quite, it is to just be alive.
I was glad my sister was sitting beside me at that moment.
• Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.
