When you are selected for the senior Australian Test cricket team, you are given a baggy green.
We would recognize the baggy green as a fulsome baseball cap, and just another item in a sports uniform. In Australia, it has in recent years become a sort of holy relic.
Modern Australian cricketers who've earned a baggy green opt to wear the same one their entire careers.
The cap gradually becomes ragged through use. Therefore, the tattier the headgear, the more central the wearer's place in Australia's main sports church.
It wasn't always thus. It used to be that Australian cricketers had their caps replaced before each tour. But over the past quarter century, dovetailing with a period of Australian dominance, it became the done thing to flaunt your fraying baggy green like a monk might his habit.
"Enjoy every single moment that you wear the cap on your head," one of Australia's greats, Richie Benaud, once said as he handed a cap to the team's newest member. "And respect the traditions of Australian cricket like many that have passed before."
This sort of quasi-religious talk is easy to live up to when things are going well. When they aren't, it gets harder to play the saint. If you then make the mistake of sinning, people will take it very poorly.
That's where Australian cricket finds itself today, caught up in the most heated and foolish cheating scandal in recent sports history.
Over the weekend, the Australian Test cricket team was busy doing what it has done too much of recently – getting gazumped at Test cricket. Down a bundle of runs to South Africa, with no hope of winning and another miserable day still to go, the visiting Australians decided to take a more direct hand in their luck.
Members of the team – exactly whom is still at issue – hatched a plot to tamper with the ball during play.
Cheating in plain view is a tricky business, but made more so when you are being filmed from a dozen angles by high-definition cameras.
Australian bowler Cameron Bancroft was first caught on video fiddling with the ball, trying to scuff it up with dirt picked off the ground. When he realized he'd been spotted, he stuffed a piece of what turned out to be adhesive tape down the front of his pants. Then he pretended ignorance about what might or might not be hidden in his shorts.
As successfully executed capers go, this was the Pink Panther after downing a half-bottle of muscle relaxants. Bancroft explained his actions as being "in the wrong place at the wrong time."
It got weirder at a postmatch news conference, when Australian captain Steve Smith attempted the George Washington-and-his-cherry-tree defence.
Though he did not use the word, Smith admitted they'd cheated. He further confessed players in the team's "leadership group" had arranged the stunt over lunch, tasking Bancroft, the second-youngest member of the squad, to do the dirty work.
"It won't happen again, I can promise you that, under my leadership," Smith said.
Asked if he would quit as captain, Smith dug in: "No, I won't be considering stepping down. I still think I'm the right person for the job. … But I take responsibility as the captain."
Captaining this Australian team is not quite like any other position in sport. More than athletes, men in the role are held up as moral beacons. Per the local cliché, it's the second most important job in the country.
Smith's urgent attempt to save his own neck, rather than go down like a gentleman, set off a frenzy at home. A bush-league effort at showing well became a national crisis of faith.
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull (the guy with the most important job) called it a "shocking disappointment." He said the plot "beggars belief." He has compulsively returned to the issue for days. Others were less circumspect.
Under Test cricket's strict, often unspoken (and just as often contravened) code of conduct, Australia has a reputation as the sport's unlikeable bully. It plays the game right, but only when it suits. At the last Ashes, Australians were accused of taunting and throwing at opponents' heads. Rumours of rule dodging have trailed them for years.
Smith's blunder allowed the rest of the cricket world to jump in two-footed. Here were the guardians of the temple caught stealing from the charity box.
On Tuesday, Cricket Australia attempted to put a pin in the episode, and instead planted it in its own eye.
Smith, Bancroft and vice-captain David Warner were cut from the current tour. Doubters noted that is a suspiciously small "leadership group."
In not yet announcing any further punishments, Cricket Australia CEO James Sutherland leaned on the "due process" excuse, as if Australians neither have TVs nor understand English.
Though under heavy doubt, the coach was allowed to remain under cover of an official inquiry. Sutherland would not agree that Smith ought not to play for Australia again. Urged to use the word "cheating," Sutherland – seemingly near tears – would only say, "It's a dark day."
Given how the Australian cricket establishment has handled this – prevarications coupled with boneheaded attempts at delaying the inevitable – there will be a few more of those. Australian Test cricket will recover, but perhaps not until the current generation has moved on.
From a Canadian perspective, it makes you wonder – what would it take for us to have the same 'Burn the heretic' moment in hockey?
Hockey lacks the obvious 'cheating' mechanism to kick it off. In a sport in which it's still considered cathartic to punch the opposition in the face, an occasional deficit of sportsmanship is baked in.
But we have all the other necessaries – a cultish devotion, an often joyless fixation on tradition, a patriotic hive mind and the smug feeling that no one will ever be better at it than we are.
If not a warning, Australia's current hysteria is at least a reminder. There is nothing wrong with a nation wanting to win. But be wary of what happens once wanting becomes needing.
Cathal Kelly