Parallels are hard to draw between sports, but imagine an NBA game where both sides suddenly score 200 points, or a mile race where two runners sprint to the finish line in 3:40, or an NFL game where running backs on both teams rack up 300 yards.

Something like that happened this weekend. I don’t know what it says about this site, but I’m getting a ton of mail about it.

So I finally got around to watching the TiVo of what several emailers told me was possibly the greatest one-day cricket match ever. It didn’t disappoint.

There’s a psychological phenomenon we all know about, and it’s a huge, cool thing to embrace. I’d butcher any detailed discussion — I am an expert in nothing whatsoever — but we’ve all heard quotes about how once a mind has expanded to embrace a new idea, it can never snap back to its old size. And we’ve all sometimes surprised ourselves occasionally by coming through at work or in school or in a crisis against what look like impossible odds. In all of sport, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a greater demonstration than what just happened.

Three decades since the One Day International was introduced, no team had ever once scored 400 runs in a match; the figure had been approached only a few times, with maybe the same frequency as an American baseball players flirt with the .400 batting mark.

This last weekend, Oz played South Africa in Johannesburg. And Australia, batting first, went out and blasted 434 runs, obliterating the existing record. It was breathtaking. Even the South African fans had to applaud. But as this was 100-plus runs more than any team in he history of the game had ever successfully chased, the match was obviously over.

Except it wasn’t. The South Africans, with nothing to lose, batted like they had nothing to lose. An hour later, they were actually far ahead of the Australians’ pace. So they kept at it, banging away with an aggression they’d never before even tried. Pretty soon, the record that looked like it might stand for many years… lasted just a little less than four hours. South Africa scored 438, and 32,000 fans at the New Wanderers Stadium went bananas.

Naturally, my TiVo stopped recording during the second-to-last ball. AAAAAAAAAUUUUUGH! So I had to read about the ending online. But still. Cool as hell.

Incidentally, you might wonder if the bowling was all just crap that day or if this was in the world’s puniest park or maybe the fielding was all rubbish, but nope. The stadium is a bit smallish, but cricket matches have been held there (from what I read — I’m new to this passion) since the 1950s, and nobody ever got near these numbers before. And as to the bowling, yes, Mick Lewis actually put up the worst numbers in history — I really do think John Howard himself couldn’t have been much worse — but Nathan Bracken had the best day of his career. And while Bracks did drop one ball in the field quite badly — does he know that he has fingers, and he’s allowed to use them? — both sides made a number of remarkable catches all day, diving for balls, one-handing line drives, yanking down flies at the boundary, and pulling in sinkers just inches from the turf.

Nope, the batting really was that amazing. And so sports sections in newspapers in not just Oz, but South Africa and India and Kenya and England and Trinidad and New Zealand and the rest of the cricket-playing world are already discussing how the game might henceforth be played with an entirely new set of expectations.

Granted, cricket may not be your thing. But surprising yourself by doing something mind-blowing and cool probably is. Setting impossible goals and then reaching them is a thing people do somewhere on Earth every day.

So, you may ask: how does this apply to politics, hunger, war, global warming, etc.?

Simple: however you imagine it does.

UPDATE: In the 5-day test which followed this post, Australia crushed South Africa handily.  The South African batsmen batted lazily, their footwork perhaps adversely affected by their ODI experience.  Their concentration in the field was positively dreadful as well.  They blamed some of this on the different ground conditions in Cape Town, but that had nothing to do with their footwork or ability to catch balls batted directly into their hands.  I’m not sure what this means, but it looked more like a group psychological problem as much as anything else.  Fascinating.