Schalk Brits, all 36 years of him, looked as if he could carry on doing this well into his 50s. Nevertheless, after a typically mesmerising performance in the Twickenham sunshine, where Saracens thrashed Northampton, he revealed how near he came to retiring at the end of last season.

“I was very close,” he said. “I did accountancy in Stellenbosch and I spoke to Cambridge and Oxford about doing an MBA. The plan was to stop playing professional rugby and play one year of varsity. My wife was not that excited about me going back to be a full-time student, with three little ones, but now I am studying part time.”

There was more than a feel of the wannabe student to Saracens’ display, so high on speed and exuberance, so full of tries, so youthful. It was poignant that Brits, the oldest of them all, should capture the mood so perfectly. The shimmies and feints in the wide-open spaces, the pace, the outrageous handling skills — and all this from a front-row forward.

Rugby fans should make the most of him. He may look as if he could carry on indefinitely but he is playing now only because Saracens talked him out of retirement. This, he vows, will be his last season.

“It is time to sit back and have a beer, enjoy watching rugby and not just get bashed up. I had three operations in the off-season, so it is enough. This will definitely be my last season.”

Saracens would not allow him to play part-time while studying at Oxbridge, à la Jamie Roberts with Harlequins, but neither did they want him to leave with the departure of a host of other senior figures in recent seasons. Hence the decision to give it one more year. “If you step away, you step away. There is no return. Culturally, it is special here and the people are special. I don’t see a team, I see individuals and they help me grow.”

Culture is the word that keeps recurring when discussion turns to Saracens. Their golden rugby seems less an end result and more the natural by-product of a fecund organism. The contrast in moods emanating from the rugby of Saracens and Northampton was acute, the former running rings round the latter to rack up seven tries in the first half alone for a 41-3 lead at the break. It might be tempting to attribute such a rout to anger at the loss of their Premiership title last season but that one defeat in the semi-final to the eventual champions, Exeter, seems like a mere technicality. This was not an angry performance; it was joyous.

“It has never been about the titles,” says Brits. “It has always been about making memories with friends.

“A lot of people look at the end result and they determine their success by that. We determine it by progress and the amount of memories we have made. That is quite a different way of looking at it, different from the previous rugby organisations I have been involved with.”

He should fit right in at university, then. His age and family status might disqualify him from the more extreme modules of the student rugby syllabus but on the field he could pass for someone at least 15 years younger. He is an anomaly with which seasoned internationals struggle to contend. He says he is struggling to keep up. The rest of us would never know.

“I am 36 and it is time to say goodbye to this lovely game. But there is still one season to go.”

We should enjoy him while we can.