The words still don't feel real. Maybe they never will.
How can Shane Warne be dead? How can he have ripped his last leggie? Punched his last dart? Gone on his last tangent on commentary?
For a generation of Australians it's difficult to comprehend because Warne, from beginning to end, was larger than life, a man who was the Australian dream and live that dream like so many other Australians think they would.
We all tried to do it. We all saw Warnie rip the shit out of the ball, we saw him drift it through the air only to turn at a seemingly impossible angle once it hit the pitch and totally bamboozle whatever poor South African or English batsman was unlucky enough to cop one of his specials.
Just about every single one of us hit the pitch or the front yard or the street in front of the house, trundled in with the two-step run-up that was really more of a walk up and tried to turn our wrist just like Warnie did, because how hard can it be? Just pitch it up and really rip it out of the back of your hand. If the big unit with the blonde hair who loved baked beans and beer could do it, surely it can't be so hard?
But it was, of course, and that was Warne's magic. Of all the millions of kids – and let's not lie to ourselves, adults as well – who thought they could do it, none of them succeeded. We'll all keep trying. If you didn't give a Kookaburra or a tennis ball a tweak in the last couple of days then sadly, you might not be fair dinkum. But we'll never get there. Never, if you gave us a million years.
In a time before social media made the world's greatest athletes all the more accessible and gave us voyeuristic glimpses into their lives, Warne existed in two worlds. To look at him, he seemed so ordinary. There are blokes who have his look in every single club cricket side and most of the front bars in the country. Plenty of them are probably named Shane.
But his bowling – God, what do you even say about it that hasn't been said already? What can you say? It was a gift, a blessing, an artform he didn't invent but pretty much perfected. You can watch the old clips back, and that's about as fun a time anyone can have without getting in trouble, but to really know what it was like you had to have been there while it was happening, and I'm sorry for you if you weren't.
In his playing days, Warne seemed like a normal person who could do this extraordinary, inscrutable thing better than anybody else in the world. Great sportsmen are often unknowable – the average fan can admire and respect and even love Steve Waugh's iron will, Ricky Ponting's technical mastery or Steve Smith's eccentricity, but it's not something we can ever see in ourselves.
The average fan can let out a primal scream when Glenn McGrath took off the top of off stump or Mitchell Johnson came round the wicket with that look in his eye or Adam Gilchrist sent some poor bowler's best effort screaming into the summer sky, but what they do looks like something only an elite athlete can achieve.
In truth, what Warne did was more difficult, complicated, inscrutable and unknowable than anything any of the other greats of Australian cricket ever did. He understood that bowling is a game of fear and rhythm, of having a bomb and knowing when to drop it. What can be lost in the Warne mythos, what can be buried under a sea of VB and durries and scandals and haircuts and soundbites, is how hard he worked at spin bowling, the artform that chose him more than he chose it. Warne himself admitted, many times, that he was not a committed athlete. But he was a committed cricketer, and that was more important.
Of every human who has ever lived on this planet, not a single one of them could bowl like Shane Warne. It's highly likely that no human ever will again. He wasn't rare, he was unique. That means there was nobody else like him.
And therein lies the Warne paradox. He was a singular cricketer – it doesn't feel right to call him an athlete, he was a cricketer – wrapped in the trappings of a regular man.
Take a look at the many social media tributes to Warne over the weekend. Yes, all the hits are there and they're just as good, if not better, than you remember – the ball of the century, the 1994 hattrick, the 2005 Ashes, wicket number 700, the incredible footage from late in his career when he was playing in pointless T20 matches around the world and while miked up to the commentary box he would explain exactly how he was going to get someone out and then do it.
But there's also memories of dumb, funny things he said on television, or anecdotes about how he thought a function he went too was fancy because they only served Crown Lager or pictures of him mucking around at the races.
He had his favourite type of baked beans shipped to India during a tour. He got in trouble more than he should have long after he knew better. On commentary he would go on tangents about movies he liked or his favourite type of takeaway pizza and it would test your patience but then he'd drop some absolute gem and you'd say to yourself 'damn, Warnie's still got it'.
He was never perfect, he was never corporate even though he mixed in the wealthiest and most famed circles in the world, he would do and say things sometimes that would make you shake your head but he never lost us, not ever, and he couldn't have if he tried. He was absurdly proud of where he was from, because before he was an Australian he was a Victorian and he never, ever let anyone forget it.
He was a real person with all the shit that comes with it, not an unknowable legend. He was not a perfect superhero and in a way, it made Australia love him all the more. He was one of us. He was so like us. If he hadn't been ripping through England on the pitch, he would have been in the stands, beer in hand, enjoying the cricket as much as any other fan.
It does not feel right, in writing this piece, to call him Warne. He was Warnie. As a cricketer, he was unknowable but as a man, we all felt like we knew him. He was larger than life, but also a part of our lives.
He felt like an ordinary Australia who, through dedication to his craft, made his life extraordinary while never losing that common touch. He was the Australian dream, and while he's no longer with us he's not really gone. He'll live as long as we remember him, which will be for as long as his game is played, and probably as long as this country exists. Dreams never really die.
