DELORIS | These Boks are a cipher for the SA we desire

Today we will win. Today we lose.

Don't come crying if we lose and you feel devastated. If we win, go out and live your fabulous lives!

The Boks. I have followed them for over 50 years. I would cut out match reports from the Sunday Times and there in my blue-paged scrapbook covered in brown paper and shiny plastic is a grainy black-and-white news pic of fullback Ian McCallum putting the “fat old ugly” rugby ball between the posts to defeat the All Blacks.

Lo and behold, Antie Google tells me we went to the same varsity, UCT, and that he went on from playing for the Boks from 1968 to 1973 to become a medical doctor, analytical psychologist, psychiatrist and an adjunct professor in Earth Stewardship Science. He is a specialist wilderness guide, an author and poet as well as a director of the Wilderness Foundation.

Live and listen to learn, né? To me he was this foreboding, muddied warrior leaning in to slot it for volk and vaderland — and little me.

Today seems is no different weather-wise. It is expected to be wet, slippery and horrible in Stade de France in Paris at 9pm.

So why no sympathy if we lose? To be sure, millions of us will have woken today and at some point have said: “We are going to f... you up!” to the All Blacks. Even the most pious. These apparently are not my words, but those of Rassie and Jacques, repeated many times on social media.

Nienaber reminds me of the spy who came in from the cold with his 70s spook glasses and he makes a point of never changing his cap. Looks like he wears it like a talisman from the moment he wakes up ... to the moment he wakes up. That's how faded and full of houding it is. He is proper.

Rassie. Is it short for Rasputin? He is indeed mystical and follows in the magical footsteps of Dumbledore. He reminds me of Towerkop, a massive peak above Ladismith which is split in two. It is an incredible world 2,189m up there. The air feels rarefied, super charged, the temperatures switches at the click of a finger. It is fluid, dangerous and truly spectacular. Bewitched indeed.

But Rassie is a fun guy — when he and Jacques are not busy brewing up and orchestrating the Bok team's journey to winning the final. He can dance and jive, he gets up on roof to give his players instructions, he carries the water to them himself after clashes with those odd bods in charge of RWC. England could not put us down, and the RWC could not put Rassie in the hole.

So why should we celebrate even if, dare I whisper it, we lose? John Smit, one of our most capped players (117), a hooker, (just ask your dad to explain that to you) who captained us to world cup victory in 2007, said it was how the players related to each other, how they had been encouraged to truly bond as players, individuals and families. 

I agree. This is the most special side. In fact, they are a shining icon of how it could be. Players of different class, colour, culture and experiences, finding themselves in an egalitarian culture (known to most by that chalkboard screeching idiom of “levelling of the playing field”). They give their all and if you look carefully, there is indeed a fiery aura about them — no need to light that fire, it is at volcano strength. You can see it on the field, they think and act like one. They do my favourite South African thing, they commune.

In an incredible development, that team has come to represent a cipher of the life we want in SA. Let it be tough, even brutal, but let it be just and caring, empathetic, responsible, disciplined — the Boks give away few penalties — let it be quick, skilled, let us be trained, drilled, but also feel free to play.

We talk about their resilience, they never give up, and it is the mark of champions. But few would suggest that everything they are, everything we hear and see about them, is a subversive cipher.

We live here at home surrounded by petty authority, often a sign of fraud of one kind or another, and a panoply of things so terrible, that  those of us who lived through the ages of apartheid, struggle, liberation and corruption find it hard to believe. How could it have gone so horrendously wrong?

So greed, power mongering and irrationality are in our face here, but out there in Paris, there is another SA waiting, where the vrot ous don't make the cut and only the very best, the most intelligent, the biggest, most decent hearts succeed.

It's going to be hard if we lose and have to traipse out of our sports pubs to confront reality and that is why I suggest we don't walk in waterlogged boots. Let us float like a people in a dream, in a state of joyous hypnopompia — half asleep but waking.

Win or lose, this Bok team will be transcended to the realm of folklore, as the team that held up the mirror and showed us what we can be. World best!

And as we drive home being glared at by those tattered, flapping, sketchy advertising boards, metal skeletons falling from cupboard, try to dodge those wicked potholes, take the gap at darkened robots, it is good to hold that Bok side and all it means close to the chest.

And if we win, you will be ripping that heart from your sleeve and waving it in the air as if to shout out, this is the cipher of how we want it to be here too! Right now!

• Follow Deloris Koan on the 1,500km ride home from the northern border starting on Monday. Ten riders, most in their 60s and higher are raising money for the Eyabantwana Trust which supports paediatric doctors doing incredible surgery for children from poverty-stricken areas. Deloris will file almost daily, if they don't lose their way.