Garth Brooks, that seemingly wise philosopher from Oklahoma, sang that he could have missed the pain, but then he would have had to miss the dance.
Which is a pretty good line, despite it coming from Garth Brooks.
Edith Piaf sang Je Ne Regrette Rien.
Well, I do regret one thing, and it has been eating away at me since 1984, the year I discovered the joy of basketball: had I made far more intelligent life choices from 1959 to 1961, I would have grown much taller and been able to dunk a basketball.
As it was, I could only stand under a basketball hoop and gaze longingly at its height of 10ft 6in, and wonder why I had only made it to 5ft 5in.
I found ads in the back of Basketball Digest, which claimed to be able to add vertical inches, but these were for still-growing American teenagers.
And some of them involved a rack.
My troubles began in 1959 when I discovered cigarettes - Du Maurier usually, the coolest brand, though not the cheapest.
Capstan was an old man's cigarette.
Everyone knew smoking stunted your growth, and when I then compounded this lifestyle blunder by developing a way of walking with sunken shoulders, both hands in pockets, my dad said only a life as a round-shouldered man with spine popping periscope-like from the top of my head could possibly result.
So a potential 6ft-plus Kiwi basketball star, finished up a 5ft 5in basketball fan, able only to reach the second top shelf at New World.
However, last Christmas morning I walked into the lounge and was confronted by a gargantuan blow-up castle that Santa Claus had left for the two Chicago grandchildren.
They were transfixed.
So was I, for at the front of it, only five feet off the ground, was a basketball hoop.
Within seconds I was tomahawk and reverse dunking with jungle cries, taunting imaginary opponents with my index finger, and whanging my chest with my tiny fist.
I felt phenomenal.
My daughter took photos.
I did the caption.
Colbert Throws One Down.
But I digress.
All of this is just preamble for the real topic at hand today, which is, yes, dunking, but the proper kind, the dunking of biscuits in a cup of tea.
I had a shocking experience on that same Christmas Day when I lowered a Griffins Malt Biscuit into my tea - you know, the new Griffins Malt Biscuits, which are round and thin and shatter when you open the packet.
The dunked half immediately sunk to the bottom of the cup to form the kind of sludge you see people mopping up in gutters on TV during floods.
You may argue that if you are eating biscuit and tea together anyway, then it will taste the same.
But you would be very wrong.
Sludge is sludge.
Besides, you simply cannot read someone's tea leaves and put their life back on track when the leaves have been sludged.
Any gypsy worth her kohl will tell you that.
Griffins Ginger Nuts have also savagely declined in the past year as Griffins moved their factory from Lower Hutt to Auckland.
They are smaller - packet diameter has slimmed 0.5cm and while they still handle a good dunking - 32 seconds before the bottom half falls off - they do not absorb fluid taste like they used to.
The ones made by local bakers Coupland's, bigger and fatter, last 42 seconds before disintegrating, and they absorb fluid taste as well.
It's a very strange world we are living in, riddled with the inexplicable and the monstrously unfair.
I am glad I smoked Du Maurier and walked like a hunchback when I was 10.
Had I become a mere professional basketball player, I never would have given the real world a second thought.
• Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.
