You have just seen arguably the most talented kids ever assembled into one rugby team. The 1992 New Zealand Secondary Schools side would produce a global icon, an All Black great, a New Zealand front-row stalwart and perhaps the most mercurial first-five to pull on the black jersey. None of them knew that then, of course. There were 10 All Blacks in all – Chresten Davis, Daryl Gibson, Carl Hoeft, Jonah Lomu, Isitolo Maka, Todd Miller, Carlos Spencer, Jeremy Stanley, Royce Willis and Jeff Wilson.

Daryl Gibson. Picture / photosport.nz

Trevor Leota accrued 30 caps for Samoa over an eight-year career and first-five Ngapaku Ngapaku, who was selected for this team ahead of Spencer, played three tests for the same Pacific Island nation in 2000. It was a team for the ages, perhaps only challenged in a hypothetical, time-travel match by the 1977 Australian schoolboys side who included among their number the brothers Ella, Wally Lewis, Michael O’Connor, Michael Hawker, Chris Roche and Tony Melrose.

Carlos Spencer. Picture / Brett Phibbs

Given the stunning array of talent it might surprise you to learn it didn’t gel quickly under long-time Southland Boys’ High School coach Clive Williams. They were taken to the wire in their first match against Ireland, played in New Plymouth. Spencer, in for the injured Ngapaku, scored two tries and Lomu one, before Wilson bailed them out with a long-distance penalty from wide, with a gale blowing, to win 27-25.

By the time they got to Australia for their three-match tour, it was a different story. They were far too strong for an Australian Division II Schools XV, winning 112-5. They travelled up to Canberra and thrashed ACT Schools 65-7, with Lomu scoring three tries and Wilson kicking eight conversions.

In the finale, they destroyed the schoolboy Wallabies 31-8 in Sydney. The Australians were captained by 12-test prop Nick Stiles and contained five-test wing Graeme Bond, seven-test centre James Holbeck, Duncan McRae, best known for punching prone Lions’ first-five Ronan O’Gara 11 times while playing for the Waratahs, and, on the bench, the fantastic Joe Roff. The talent comparison, looking back, was hardly fair. We know that because we can now look at the 12 internationals in the NZ team, the 256 test caps and 40 additional All Black matches. We can look back at the career and life of Lomu and recognise him as, if not one of the greatest players that lived, then certainly one of the most important. But what of those captured here on Kodak paper who never made it to rugby’s top table? What became of the players who stood in the shadow of greatness?

Royce Willis. Picture / photosport.nz

This was four years before professional rugby would become a real thing, when Super Rugby and the NPC provided a well-paid safety net for those below the highest echelon. The term “rugby career” had a different meaning as it often worked hand in hand with an “actual career”. If you were good enough, and lucky enough, your club chairman might slip you a few notes to cover petrol money and a chicken fried rice at the Lucky Horse takeaway on the way home, but only the exceptional could entertain the idea that rugby was a path to financial security.

Jeff Wilson. Picture / photosport.nz

The 15-man code would eventually prove a lucrative profession for the likes of Wilson, Lomu, Leota, Gibson and Spencer, but this isn’t their story, that’s already been told by a thousand different people in a hundred different ways. If you could look at the team photo now and ask the others, the ones that never played test footy, what became of them, what might they say back to you? Would there be hard-luck or bad-luck stories? Would they harbour any lingering regret, any what-ifs? Would any of them echo Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront?

“I could have been a contender.”