It wasn’t meant to end like this. The greatest destructive force rugby has known was supposed to gradually remember his power (so the script runs) before flattening hapless Frenchmen at the Stade de France. Mark the date down — October 20, 2007. World Cup final.

But a scrappy Friday night game in early September 2006, told you Jonah Tali Lomu wasn’t going to make it back. Playing his first full game for North Harbour in the Air New Zealand NPC, Jonah came up against an 18-year-old Manawatu schoolboy half his size. It looked like a mismatch — and sadly it was.

I’d seen this before. I remember as a kid watching Muhammad Ali come back to challenge Larry Holmes for the heavyweight championship of the world. Ali was 38, but he looked pretty and told the world he’d beat this younger, stronger man just like he whupped big, bad George Foreman in the Rumble in the Jungle. Only after 10 sickening rounds, only when Ali hardly threw a punch, did we realise The Greatest was an illusion; he’d dyed his hair black for the fight and got himself into shape by swallowing fistfuls of diuretics.

Now I’m sitting in an Albany pub, a harried barmaid and pokie machines for company, as another hero is dismantled on a flatscreen. Jonah had moved heaven and earth to come back, but the speed just isn’t there. And where the speed went, the power, the rhythm, and that gargantuan left swerve followed.

Listening to talkback on the way home, the bandwagonists circle to say he was lazy and hopeless and slow. Other more charitable callers acknowledge he was once a great player but is now embarrassing himself and should quietly exit, stage left. Thanks for the memories, Jonah.

So here we are. Jonah tried. And yes, he failed. But doesn’t this rather miss the point? Against odds even larger than he, Jonah played first-class rugby again, if only humbly. And while it’s sad, wretched even, to see someone great slip to the ranks of ordinary, there’s pathos in seeing your hero rage against the dying of the light and, with grace, accept his mortality. And in his striving, in remaining so upbeat, cheerful and determined, Jonah taught us lessons that transcend rugby and even sport.

First, the virtue of physical courage. At the 2004 New Zealand Rugby Awards Jonah, bloated with the rare kidney disorder nephrotic syndrome, perhaps weighing 150kgs, could hardly walk. Those there watched wet-eyed as this broken giant shuffled up to the stage to collect his You-Were-Great-Once-Now-Please-Don’t-Die gong. No one thought he’d ever run again, let again play.

Second, Jonah’s comeback tells us something about fortitude. About guts. He had to work immensely hard to get back on the field, and he had to do this knowing in his heart that he’d never be the player he was. But this didn’t faze him.

And third, the game’s biggest player showed us that no one’s bigger than the game. We’re often told how it’s every Kiwi boys’ dream to be an All Black. So while Adidas tells us that our blood flows black and the marketeers drone on about “legacy” and “honouring the jersey” etc, Jonah’s the real deal. He tried desperately to play for the All Blacks again. He wanted to make one last World Cup.

With Jonah, all those HR vacuities about teamwork actually meant something. Here was the consummate team man. Last year, sidelined with the shoulder injury sustained in the Martin Johnson benefit romp, his first game back, he became North Harbour’s largest ever water-boy. How humiliating said the carpers.

And this year, when North Harbour won the Ranfurly Shield for the first time, a bench-bound Jonah sat watching as his Super 14 and All Blacks dreams dissolved. There was no bitterness. The team’s success was what mattered — and the big grin said so. When his roisterous teammates wanted to toast the Log into the small hours, it was to Jonah’s house they repaired.

It’s a nice story. But not untypical. For all the accoutrements of fame — the braided hair, the souped-up Skyline, the loudest car stereo in the world, the occasional lapses into the third-person when talking about oneself — he retained a decency and maturity uncommon in professional sport.

An example? When the All Blacks fell to the French in the semi-finals of the 1999 World Cup, one man stayed out on the field, his head up, congratulating the victors.

Now let’s step back a moment and remember that professional rugby today, for better and worse, would not be where it is without Jonah. It was his heroics on the high veldt in ‘95 — the four tries against England, the Catt-trampling, the ‘oh oh ohs’ of Keith Quinn — that got the attention of the moneymen. Rugby was always going to go pro, but one man made Murdoch double the pot.

Yet there was always an ambivalent attitude towards him back home. I saw him do stupendous things for the Wesley College 1st XV, once carrying an entire forward pack on his back for 50 metres before falling, but there were always sideline snipers lambasting him as a lazy, dumb coconut — all brawn, no brains. ‘Wait ‘til he starts playing men,’ they’d snarl. ‘Then he’ll be found out.’

When the nephrotic syndrome first diagnosed in 1996 sapped his strength, stole his stamina, the same snide, racist remarks would be made. But Jonah never complained. In an age where we make excuses for our weaknesses, he played down the true, debilitating nature of his.

If Jonah’s illness stopped him from being the greatest player of all time, he’d dominate any highlights reel. And for two glorious months — at the ’95 and ’99 World Cups — he was as fine a rugby player as has ever been. He was the best in the world at two World Cups: no rugby player and perhaps only Pele can say that. Small wonder a boy faxed the All Blacks before the English semi in ’95 with expert advice. “Remember rugby is a team game,” he wrote. “All 14 of you pass it to Jonah.”

I saw him play live for the All Blacks just once. It was the trial side that John Mitchell took to Europe at the end of 2002, leaving behind 21 of our top guns including most of the forward pack. Mitchell said a lacklustre Lomu was selected solely on reputation. But at Twickenham, the stadium the Brits simply call HQ, Jonah exploded.

Exploded? Jonah was so ridiculously good that he made writers ordinary. When he ran it was hard to look past ‘rampaging’ or ‘bulldozing’ or ‘stampeding’. Ever since I’d seen him play at Wesley College, I’d tried to understand how he did it. I’d tried to crack his secret. I wanted to work out was he so hard to stop.

Though he was usually the biggest player on the field — and very often the quickest — that wasn’t the answer. The power came from somewhere else: somehow he seemed to gain momentum from contact. It seemed contrary to the usual laws of physics but watch Jonah in slow-mo and you’ll understand. You’ll see him shove tacklers away, push off them, and take their power for his own. You’ll see the way he crunches into players but seems to ping off, pinballishly, and slam even harder into the next hapless fool.

I’d also vainly tried to describe what Jonah looked like at full gallop. There was some rhino there, some buffalo, even some elephant. But that stutter step when he got the ball, the lurch left and then the thunder into stride — that was Phar Lap, that was Bonecrusher, that was Empire Rose. Yet the power and menace — there was something leonine, tigerish about that.

But then I realised I was looking in the wrong place. Jonah played rugby like he was in a video game.

Like in the movies. There’s a moment in that last English test that’s so Boys-Own I wonder if I dreamed it. This is what I think happened. The English are grinding us into the ground — we’re imprisoned inside our 22. Somehow the ball bobbles out to Jonah who cuffs a tackler aside like a brat and then, from a standing start, leaps left, bolts, his stride lengthening, his marker fading. Everyone is on their feet, just as they are whenever Jonah touches the ball — the guy beside me, a tweeded, ruddy-cheeked chum from Surrey is standing on his chair. “No Jonah. No Jonah” he mutterers, then “Go Jonah!”

He barges one defender aside, then another until he’s ridden down after a 50-metre bust. But he’d still score twice that day. Asked later how they’d stop Jonah next time, English defensive coach Phil Larder deadpanned, “I’d probably work with the SAS and have somebody with an elephant gun in the stand.”

Of course, in the end, all it’d take was a pair of failing kidneys and a dialysis machine.

Heroes aren’t meant to die like this. But is this now the end? Really? I can’t let it be. Jonah says he’ll play on because he loves the game, but for who? North Harbour B? The nascent Wesley RFC, the club starting up at his old alma mater? Or might he cross the ditch and sign for John Mitchell’s Western Force or even the Gold Coast Titans, the new NRL side.

Perhaps he’ll become a roving rugby Ambassador, inculcating the world with All Black propaganda. He’d be great at that. After all he was, he is, the most famous rugby player in the world. But a small part of me still thinks he’s going to make it back in Black. I can’t give up on his dream. I don’t want let him go.

One day I’ll have to. It hurts. The last game I watched live with my late father was the ‘Game of the Century’, the 39–35 win over the Wallabies at Stadium Australia in front of record 110,000 crowd. Jonah scored the winning try in injury time. That’s a pretty good memory. And one day I’ll be able to tell my son that I saw Jonah, the Muhammad Ali of rugby, score his last tries for the All Blacks.

From Band of Brothers, the Metro magazine story of the 2004 Wesley College 1st XV’s march to the New Zealand secondary schools rugby title.

Two days before the final, the team are having lunch in the school’s dining hall. Suddenly, there’s a commotion as a souped-up, metallic-blue Skyline pulls into the carpark. The boys have seen this car before. They know the driver. They rush to the dining room window, mouths agape, to see if it really is him.

“Calm down, boys,” scolds Wesley 1st XV coach Chris Bean. “C’mon. Sit down and wait for Jonah to come inside.”

The greatest Wesleyan of them all takes his place at the front of the room, leaning against the servery. He has encouraging words. “One of the very best experiences you can have in rugby is to represent your school,” he tells them. “For me, playing for the Firsts was second only to playing for the All Blacks.”

He wishes the boys well. “Don’t play the game beforehand in your head,” he instructs. You’ll tire yourselves out from thinking too much. Play for each other on Saturday.”

He asks the boys if they have any questions.

“Jonah! Are you really coming back?” one of the boys asks excitedly. Is he going to play rugby again after his kidney transplant?

Yes, Jonah says. In fact, he’s on his way to training right now. He leads the boys outside to his car, cranks the stereo up, plays them some beats. He starts the car, gratuitously revs the engine, then, with the boys whooping, does a burnout and drives off.

“Jonah’s off to training,” one of the boys says knowingly.

“Yeah,” says another, even more sagely. “He’s gonna do 15 three-minute rounds of kickboxing.”