It's not the short, sharp run-up, the ratio of googlies to everything else, the reliable supply of wickets. Neither is it the eyes alive with life, the derailed celebrations, the earnestness brought to the odd business of batting.
So, what jewel will Imran Tahir leave in the memory? The Throw.
Newlands. October 12 2016. The fifth match of an already decided one-day series. Andile Phehlukwayo bowls the first delivery of the 48th over to David Warner, who is 172 not out.
Warner dances away from his leg stump to slap the ball through the off-side, bustles down the pitch for one, turns for two, storms back.
In the deep, where the floodlights' hold on the scene is loosening, where you smell the beer, hear the brouhaha and know the mountain broods beyond, Tahir is fury on legs. He advances from the boundary, gathers, sets himself, takes a step towards the middle, cocks his arm. The ball is his ammunition. Quinton de Kock's cupped gloves are his target.
Time stops. And rewinds: to the 38th over, which ends with Tahir in high dudgeon at Warner in the wake of an unsuccessful referral after an appeal for lbw is turned down.
Tahir continues his tirade while he takes his cap and sweater from the umpire. He keeps going for long, increasingly awkward minutes. The umpires try to put out the fire. They fail. Several of Tahir's teammates try, too. And fail, too. One of them is the calmest man in cricket, Hashim Amla, whose efforts bounce off Tahir like a scrumhalf off a sumo wrestler.
"I had no idea what sparked it," Warner says later. "I'm still trying to work it out. For the first time in my life I didn't say anything."
Considering what we now know Warner to be, like bloody hell he didn't.
The suits take a dim view, along with 30% of Tahir's match fee. They also give him something: two demerit points.
"Tahir displayed a lack of respect for the umpires when he ignored their requests to stop by continuing to verbally engage with ... Warner."
Oh ICC. Have you no pulse? When cricket cuts through all the cluttering constructs of life and reminds you that people run on passion more than anything else, do you not bleed? Probably not.
Time unpauses. Dale Steyn's or David Miller's throw is human engineering at its most impressive - a swoop of strength that goes from A to B with impossibly fluid simplicity and unimpeachable authority. It is, in a word, beautiful. Not so Tahir's throw, an apologetic squiggle.
But this particular squiggle is not saying sorry. It is aflame with righteousness and it burns a path, flat and fast, from the beer and the brouhaha and the brooding mountain beyond all the way into De Kock's hovering gloves.
Warner dives in desperation as De Kock does the needful. He knows it's out as he throws the ball into the ground in disbelief. He rips off his right glove, balls that hand into a fist, unleashes a shoulder shuddering punch of joy into the night sky, and lets loose a whooping stream of consciousness. The Throw does that to you. If it doesn't, see your doctor.
Tahir kisses his cap badge, thrusts his arms into the air and roars. How he doesn't self-combust is a miracle. This is what justice looks and feels like.
It's also what success means for SA cricket. That someone can come from a completely different culture and a hemisphere away and become one of us so completely is a thing of wonder.
Soon the proof of that wonder will fade: Tahir says the World Cup will mark his last one-day internationals for SA.
Thank you, Mr Tahir. For everything. Especially The Throw...