Fifty shades of Graeme

The ICC Cricket World Cup is starting and I couldn't be more excited if I was 20 years old and all the world lay open before me.

At 1am on February 26 1992 I was walking from my girlfriend's flat in Rondebosch to my friend Mark's house in Claremont to watch South Africa play their first ever World Cup game.

The streetlights were out on Main Road and I walked the warm dark sidewalk, just me and a couple of rent boys and a married man in a slow-moving car who circled back three times, refusing to believe I wasn't a rent boy, although I'm still not sure what he thought I'd gain by lying about it.

I was giddy with anticipation. Nelson Mandela was free, the referendum about democratic elections was imminent and the light at the end of the long, unlit tunnel of our history was a television screen bright with floodlights and coloured clothing and the roar of a crowd an ocean away. The TV was a Tardis, bigger inside than out: the world was there and we were in it and the world was happy to play with us again. It seemed a dream, a gift too unexpected, too precious to last.

The games were in Australasia and started in the dead of night so we slept during the day and shone lights in our eyes at night to try to change our circadian rhythms. I was still on the road so I missed our first ball - when Geoff Marsh middled it to Dave Richardson and every human alive saw it except me and the umpire - but it was the last one I missed.

Everything felt important then. Each moment, each straight bat and stolen single, every dot ball, crease-scrape and hitch of the sleeve mattered. Time had a beautiful, elastic intensity. We felt alive, sitting night after night in the suburban dark, trying to keep it down so we didn't wake Mark's sister. We were studying law and had assignments and lectures in the mornings and there on his old sofa, with Jonty Rhodes in my eyes, I had the first dreamy intimations that there were deeper blisses to follow than being a lawyer.

When we washed out of that World Cup I was sad but not depressed. I had found something to adore and the object of my adoration and I had done right by each other, and that left no space for regret. It was only in the coming years that my attachment grew silly and self-harming, when I convinced myself that it was only my vigilance that kept the team afloat, that they needed me and I needed them.

As each World Cup went by and we found ever-worse ways of exiting I began to fret that we were bearing the curse of history, the sins of our fathers carrying down the generations, a blood-guilt that marked us all out - and me especially personally - for eternal disappointment. The love affair had reached an unhealthy obsessive phase of peevish, stalkery submission verging on the masochistic. It was my own personal Fifty Shades of Graeme.

Set free the thing you love. Four years ago I was interested but without expectation. The events in the subcontinent occurred as though through a pane of glass, or to someone else. When we lost I was disappointed but not seared. I shrugged and went about my business, and that saddened me, as though something young and fine had died.

But just recently I've felt it again - the bright eyes and shallow breath, heart skipping like a small girl in a country meadow - and I realised that my adolescent passion hasn't died, just grown up. I couldn't have loved before because I wasn't ready for love, and I'm glad that I waited because this is a team to love: this team of AB and JP and Aaron and Imran and the Mighty Hash, this team that Graeme built, this team of ours.

I only really have a Twitter account in order to watch cricket with other people, as though it's 1992 again, on a thousand sofas at once. Some on Twitter have begged me not to say what I'm about to say. They call me a Jonah and a jinx, and insist that every hopeful prophesy I utter brings down disaster on the team. There's some evidence for this, but superstition is for kids. I can't be silent, no, nor dim this dawn in my heart. This is the seventh generation of sons of our soil sailing to the World Cup, and if we lose it won't be a reflection on me or us or our futures or our past, life won't change and nothing will end. But this time I believe we're going to win.