Dean Elgar was disgusted. Not because he was sat on a flight of stairs at the wrong end of a queue to catch the day's last ferry back to town.
Not because he had, in the previous few hours, watched a machine make poo. Not because, in the same few hours, he had encountered a wall covered in 151 lifelike but inanimate representations of vaginas.
He was fine with all that. Kind of. It was the type of thing you would expect to be confronted with at the Museum of Old and New Art (Mona), which is a few minutes up the Derwent River from Hobart's waterfront.
It was November 16 2016: the day after the second Test, at Bellerive Oval, was to have ended. But South Africa had swept their opponents away by an innings to clinch the series with a day to spare.
Having dealt on what would have been the fifth day with any and all consequences of their celebrations, several members of the touring party - along with their partners and offspring - made the trip out to Mona.
Much museum meandering later, they were waiting for the return ferry. And, as they sat there, Elgar's face curdled with more distaste than the sight, sound and smell of any amount of manufactured poo or fake genitalia could achieve.
"That's a bloody stupid idea," he said with sneering lips and loathing eyes.
What had so grossed him out?
Simply the idea that, with South Africa about to play their first-ever day/night Test in Adelaide, a paradigm shift in batting philosophy was required.
In other day/night Tests the pink ball, having behaved normally in daylight hours, had swung and seamed alarmingly at twilight.
So why not open the batting with players who would normally take strike in the middle order and save the top-order men - who had the better techniques - to deal with the challenge that would come once the lights were lit?
It seemed a notion worthy of discussion, at least. But Elgar dismissed it in those five words as surely as he might turn an errant delivery off his hip.
He made five and nought in Adelaide, and faced 20 pink balls in total. But, in 22 innings since, he has scored five centuries and another five half-centuries.
He is Test cricket's highest scorer this year, and the only player who has reached 1000 runs this year.
Considering Elgar's profession as an opening batsman, the most unforgiving in cricket, those numbers are stratospheric.
No one has had more than his 20 innings in tests in 2017 but of the other three who have had as many opportunities, only Sri Lanka's Dimuth Karunaratne is an opener. And he is 157 runs behind Elgar.
That Elgar has starred in these days of hyper, ultra, high-speed everything despite his steadfast old-fashionedness is to raise hopes that cricket remains, perhaps, perchance, the game we knew.
Another damn fool idea, no doubt.
