Some older cricketers embody a certain difficult-to-define quality. This quality might be experience, or knowledge, or a kind of technical expertise, but that's somehow too reductive and constraining, while also missing the mark.
I was thinking about this the other day when watching the Cobras all-rounder, Justin Kemp, a key player in Friday's Momentum One-Day Cup final against the Titans at Newlands.
He was playing at the Wanderers, against the Highveld Lions, and the light was fading. There was no one there, and still he went about things with the same dignity he would have done if the stadium was full.
Although nobody cheered in the stands, the television cameras were there, so we can't be completely naive about things like behaviour and dignity, but there was something transcendent in the way Kemp went about his business.
The game held no surprises for him. He was comfortable with cricket in the same way a fish is thoughtlessly comfortable in water. He was in his natural element, a perfect fit. It was humbling.
Another element in Kemp's projection had to do with a certain quality of respect older cricketers have for their craft. We do not think of sportsmen being craftsmen in the main nowadays. Instead, we think of them as entertainers or superstars or celebrities with impressively tawdry social lives. But cricket is a game of great craft and great craftiness.
Kemp banged a couple of square cuts to the sweeper boundary and lifted some of his trademark lofted drives over the inner ring, his bat scything through the air in a clear, clean arc. His technical professionalism was almost artisanal. He could have been banging a red-hot horseshoe on an anvil or perhaps binding a wine keg, a member of a great medieval craftsman's guild.
I think of Kemp (and his teammate, Charl Langeveldt) in this way because older cricketers play the sport with a kind of disinterested respect. They honour their sport by playing it fairly and properly.
In a way, they are the sport's guardians and younger men – those more windgat, more full of piss and wind, as my parents' generation would say – will never reach sporting manhood without them.
You might think administrators keep the sport ticking over, which is not entirely wrong; you might think that television officials, with their wads of cash, keep the sport financially healthy. This wouldn't be wrong either.
But the people who keep the sport's soul reasonably wholesome are those who used to be called the senior professionals, people like Kemp and Langeveldt and Heino Kuhn, whose century at Kingsmead on Tuesday night did much to shepherd his side to a final that looked impossibly out of reach earlier in the competition.
For those of a statistical bent, Kemp has scored 234 runs at 33.42 going into the final, gobbling five catches in the slips and taking 11 wickets at 27, his overs going for less than five runs per over. But like, say, Freddie Flintoff, (or, in a different sport, the great Irish centre, Brian O'Driscoll), his role cannot be squashed into his statistics, he is too big-hearted a cricketer for that.
Kemp probably didn't have the international career he was destined for – or even deserved – but he is part of a dying generation of professional cricketers in this country. He was educated in the platteland, at Queens College in Queenstown, like the Greig brothers, Tony and Ian, and the great, gifted malcontent, Daryll Cullinan, a man we now realise we would have travelled further to see had we realised how empty the feeling would be when he was gone.
Like Cullinan, Kemp was coached by English country pros, who came to South Africa in the English winter in search of fun and sun. He bats from a textbook, he is the Cobras' de facto captain, his role is immeasurable.
If all of this sounds too fanciful and speculative, I challenge you to watch him in the final, either in the flesh or on television. You will see how much joy he brings to the game; you will see how his teammates respect him; you will see how he does not go to the game, but how, in his long-limbed ebullience, the game tends to come to him.
This is no accident, for he is this kind of player, a shaper. It is not too much to say that the Cobras' success against the Titans relies on him and Langeveldt, their much underrated captain, Justin Ontong, and Andrew Puttick, who just seems to be sailing into form. They make a vital quartet.
Despite their late fairytale run, it is difficult to see the Titans matching them.