OPINION: As Richie McCaw faces his final test, his stature endures beyond fashion and the fleeting pop of fame.

Next weekend, whatever happens, Richie McCaw will almost certainly play his final test match for New Zealand. 14 years after his first test, the most capped All Black in history, the most capped player in history, and the greatest number 7 the game of rugby has ever seen, will probably do what he has always seemed incapable of doing – stop.

150,000 people play rugby in New Zealand. More than half of them are children, aged twelve and under. All those boys and girls (there are 17,000 females playing rugby) with their dreams of being All Blacks or Black Ferns. And none of those kids was born when Richie McCaw played his first test, in Dublin, a controversial selection after only 17 games for Canterbury, being named man of the match, starting as he meant to go on, 14 extraordinary years ago.

A young Richie McCaw at the centre of his Kurow under 10 team photo in 1990. The team played 14, and won 13 lost 1, scoring 492 points with just 70 scored against them.

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That's a long shadow to cast, all those children who want to be you when they grow up, and it's an immense weight of responsibility. And not once, in 14 years, has Richie McCaw let them down.

Consider that achievement, from a young man in an age when every drink you have, every social media posting, every security camera in a bar, every drunk with an attitude, every opportunist with a cell phone camera or snapper with a long lens, everything you do, potentially contains the seeds of your embarrassment and your Mike Tindall decline.

A young Richie McCaw at the centre of his Kurow under 10 team photo in 1990. The team played 14, and won 13 lost 1, scoring 492 points with just 70 scored against them.

Richie McCaw's triumph, on and off the field, his ability to be the man he so completely understands he is required to be, is down to a singular will. When the World Cup final ended, at Eden Park in 2011, when the whistle blew for a penalty and their relief was so raw and prodigious that the All Blacks seemed to burst with it, Richie McCaw, who wasn't smiling yet because the effort had been so heavy, wrapped himself in an embrace with Ali Williams, Israel Dagg and Andrew Hore, and said just four words: "We f***ing did it."

He wasn't boasting, he wasn't gloating, he wasn't talking to us but to his teammates and to himself, and if you watch those seconds again, you realise he was piercing the almost impossible burden of the obligation he felt, to win.

THE ART OF RUGBY

I love rugby, but I do know many people who rail against its domination of our media, and I can see their point. My friend Hamish Keith prays we'll one day devote even a fraction of the words we pour so torrentially upon rugby, to art.

Will even one excited reporter follow Lisa Reihana's transcendently brilliant In Pursuit of Venus (infected) to the Venice Biennale? (If the answer is "no", that will shame us.) But if rugby is a spotlit obsession, as football is in so many countries, and cricket is in some, and baseball or basketball or ice hockey is in others, and if the people who play it at the most senior levels are idealised and subjected to an almost predatory scrutiny, then something way more than sport is asked of them. The All Black captain is also, somehow, required to be an exemplar of us. (When all he wanted to do was play rugby.)

The truth is, because they are people and people can be like this, a few of the rugby players I've met in my 26 years of journalism have been uncharitable men; entitled, begrudging in their treatment of the game's wide-eyed fans, taciturn and almost wilfully joyless. But not in recent years. Richie McCaw and Steve Hansen have presided over a reconnection of rugby with the country that gives it so much, and also, asks so much of it.

NO 7 REMAINS NUMBER ONE

On the night the All Blacks left for the World Cup, I was at Auckland Airport.

And I asked the children amongst the crowd of people who were there to farewell the team, who was their favourite player – Richie McCaw was number one, by a distance. The brilliant, young wings were making a run, as they so wonderfully do, and Dan is so beloved he doesn't even need a surname, but the captain has endured, beyond fashion and the fleeting pop of fame, into permanence.

When he stands down, when he plays his last game, the jersey will remain, the team will remain, the number 7 will not be retired, as it might have been in basketball, and Kieran Reid or Sam Cane will pick up the captaincy with their skill and big-hearted application, but even so, something particular will be lost.

There's a photo of him, aged 10 or thereabouts, in the red jersey of his Kurow Rugby Club, perhaps almost a little chubby, eyeing the camera with a smile of belonging. Could he see the future? No. But was he already creating it? Game by game, decision by decision, action by action, working to be the man he became?

On that night at Eden Park, four years ago, when they "f***ing did it", his foot so badly injured he kept the extent of the injury a secret, the crowd cheering and cheering and cheering, our cameraman Chris Jones and I were on the field in the glorious, raucous period after the game.

Brad Thorne said a silent prayer. Stephen Donald smiled with joy and bewilderment and wonder, "bloody good", he said, not yet realising how much his life would be defined by that kick, Ali Williams hugged people like a lottery winner, and Richie McCaw, smiling by now because he understood it was finally over, a hint of that Kurow 10-year old about him, said the team had "showed what was under the left tit, under the silver fern, they showed what it mean to be an All Black and be a Kiwi."

Which, for 14 years, is what Richie McCaw has done. Leading by example. The scrutiny, the responsibility, the pressure. Forcing himself on. And on. To be as good as he could possibly be. And then better.