Yet another international cricket team is here. Australia.
That's three in seven weeks.
When I grew up praying for visiting international cricket teams, my little red autograph book hungry for scrawl, we were lucky to get one a year.
And yet one thing has remained constant through all that time: the sporting public still expects New Zealand cricket teams to underachieve, collapse and lose.
I am sure this congenital belief derives from that 1950s decade when I was developing my lifelong passion for the game.
I first went to Carisbrook in 1958, when Otago needed a first innings win over Canterbury to win the Plunket Shield.
John Reid scored 201 and the Shield was ours.
I was hooked.
And John Reid's large signature, as large as he was a player, was top left on page one of my autograph book.
I was an impudent autograph hunter.
I once went to Alec Moir's house in Sheen St to get his, and I shockingly thrust my book into the glowering face of Jack Alabaster as he reached for the gate after being dismissed without scoring.
"Don't you know what it's LIKE?" he thundered at me.
Well, no.
I had never been dismissed for a duck at Carisbrook.
The wretched 1958 tour of England was naked torture for a 9-year-old cricket fan.
We were torn apart in every test.
I remember sitting in the Rose Stand at Carisbrook with my grandfather, who seemed to know all the famous cricket people, and listening to the father of one the young batsmen on that tour telling how he marched into the England dressing-room and berated their fast bowlers for bullying his son with bouncers.
The game's scions accidentally revealed many great stories back then, thinking the little bespectacled boy with his hands placed politely on each white knee, couldn't possibly be listening.
Three years before, England had bowled us out for 26, still the world record test low.
The apocryphal overheard conversation from that game was: "Did you see New Zealand bat?" "No, I was putting my hat under the seat at the time."
In 1956, we finally won a test after 26 years, again still a record test low.
But since 1960, New Zealand has often done exceptionally well, beating absolutely everyone at home in the 1980s.
We were even allowed to play Australia again in 1973, 27 years after a savage mauling which saw us dismissed for 42 and 54.
Awful stuff, but did we deserve 27 years of non-parole?The belief the Black Caps will usually find a way to lose has fascinated me for years.
Generally, in sports bulletins, when our cricketers lose, we lose again.
All Black losses are scorned and decried - psychologists even brought on to television to becalm the nation and offer victim support - but the difference is, the All Blacks are always expected to win.
Rugby health is now judged by the World Cup.
Interestingly, the All Blacks and Black Caps' results over the past 20 years have been strikingly similar.
Both have had three semifinals and a quarterfinal.
The All Blacks were beaten finalists in their other World Cup, while nobody knows how the Black Caps would have fared in 2003 had they not forfeited a quarterfinal place by refusing to travel to Kenya for political reasons.
Glenn Turner scored two centuries to beat Australia for the first time in 1974, immediately running off the field, presumably to get away from an opposition who had been sledging him blind all summer.
Turner did not celebrate success with a dry hump like today's excitable young gelled-hair millionaires.
"Australia are better than us," he told me once, "but there are ways we can beat them."
The little red autograph book is somewhere in the basement now, but I still go into every Black Caps series with the ferocious optimism of a 9-year-old.
Even when it's Australia.
I really hope we knock the bastards off.
