Greg Baum: A night in a time machine

GB is transported back 40 years at a cricket reunion

The other night, while looking around the room at the reunion of a suburban cricket premiership I played in 40 years ago, I convinced myself that we hadn’t changed much. Photos shared the next day awakened me from my dreamy delusion. Then I realised that I had been seeing us not as we are, but as we were. For one night, the space-time continuum collapsed, and the intervening four decades were as nothing.

It was a heady time. We won an abbreviated semi on a wet weekend, a match our higher-placed opponents didn’t have to win and were reluctant to play. We used towels to dry the pitch and charm to convince the umpires that it was dry, and we scraped through.

The final was a genuinely rip-roaring game of cricket, four days over two weekends, see-sawing throughout and won as the sun was sinking on the second Sunday. Now we reconstructed it, poring over old scorecards and annual reports like archaeologists at a dig, searching memory banks and when necessary, patching in white lies, glorious white lies (seen in a certain light, my 31 as blurrily entered in the scorebook could easily have been 51 or even 71).