New Zealanders have just lived through a Golden Age of Cricket. That's not a sentence many brought up with a love of the great game in the 1990s thought they would read as the national side took the gains made in the 1980s - mostly though the deeds of the great Sir Richard Hadlee and the burgeoning talent of Martin Crowe - and flubbed them away in a drunken fog of amateurism while the rest of the world took a more rigidly professional approach. The green shoots of a recovery started to emerge under the young, urbane leadership of Stephen Fleming and, despite as many downs as ups, took flight when Brendon McCullum and coach Mike Hesson created an environment where failure was accepted as long as it came with grass stains, skinned elbows and a fearlessness never seen before on our cricket fields. Four ICC tournament finals later, including a heartbreaking tie in the 2019 ODI final and a win in the inaugural World Test Championship, has cemented this era as New Zealand's greatest. These are the modern legends of summer who paved the way: Stephen Fleming, Nathan Astle, Daniel Vettori, Shane Bond, Brendon McCullum, Ross Taylor, Tim Southee, Martin Guptill, BJ Watling, Kane Williamson, Trent Boult, Neil Wagner.