EVERY FOURTH YEAR the hype builds around this time and every fourth year I tell myself I’ll have none of the Lions. 

What’s not to like? The odds are the first thing that have bothered me, always. Four nations ought to be stronger than any one. Yet this thing can get romaticised as a band of Shakletonesque adventurers leaving the pier in a skiff to slay the Ottoman Empire. 

The working out of new combinations and lineout calls can’t be that hard, especially among players who have been earmarked as the elite. I have a complicated theory: if you put good players together in any sport they’ll do well. If the Lions don’t do well you can attribute it to the players not being as good as billed, or coaches getting in the way. 

It’s some enterprise for rousing speeches. This is your Everest boys! It’s an awesome responsibility! There is no tomorrow! 

There’s always a tomorrow. Always another tour, another call to arms, another legend to be written and more pints to be sank. It’s a lucrative venture too, with sponsors keen to tether themselves to the earnest missives and splurges on travel and replica jerseys. It can all become a bit forced; a relic of the amateur era desperate to survive in the modern calendar which already demands a lot of people. 

So it’s easy enough to declare your non-interest at this remove, to book yourself in for a summer of not watching any of it. But . . .  there is a Godfather Part Three quality to the way it keeps dragging you back in. 

You can’t make new old habits and you can’t forget the vivid times. I’ve never been on a Lions tour, and can safely predict that I never will be either. Yet it all seemed very immediate to me in the summer of 1989, when the Lions toured Australia. I can remember getting up at a quiet hour in a holiday house somewhere in remote west Kerry to watch the second test. Jeremy Guscott’s grubber kick and touchdown to put the Lions clear got me out of the chair and the rest of the house awake – and they were properly disinterested in the Lions, demonstrably unappreciative of the dawn ruckus. 

As a child it felt as once disconcerting and thrilling to cheer a Guscott try, his only previous familiarity coming from beating up on Ireland next to Will Carling. But now, after it looked as if the Lions were going to lose the game and the series 2-0, they were back in it and there was no way you wouldn’t be watching the deciding game. 

I’ve been watching ever since, pretty much. 1997 was the year the Lions really took off as a marketing man’s fever dream. Generations of fans have watched and rewatched the Living with Lions documentary, which came out in 99. You could argue that this tape is up there with Jonah Lomu and South Africa in 95 as launch events for rugby as a professional sport with crossover appeal. 

All of that tub-thumping wasn’t for me, but going back to look at the old Lions speeches this morning I felt myself softening to it. The Willie John McBride ones hit hard, but Ian McGeechan’s words from 2009, before the final test, are really quite affecting.

The tour is a lost cause at this point, the Lions 2-0 down, but his exaltation to persevere, his explanation as to why there is “everything to play for” is a rare example of a team-talk having resonance for general life. The camera stays on him as the room empties, McGeehan turns his back and sobs. This is his life’s work, to invest the best of himself in the Lions; to strive to make it something worth inheriting. You’d be a cold enough character not to be moved. The man who goes to comfort him is Graham Rowntree.

Perhaps the biggest reason why the Lions endures is players and supporters love it. Despite all of the other demands on their time and bodies, players still clearly view selection and the subsequent tour as a career pinnacle. 

A few years back I somehow found myself ghosting a column of a player who had been on a couple of tours. What’s the big deal with it? The ball never drops in training. You go to the gym thinking you’re doing extra to find the England World Cup winning team of 03, to a man, already in there. 

It was all that and the chance to make friends with lads from other countries. The presence of elders such as Bill Beaumont was a positive too, he’d be pointing out places they visited on tours of way back; the link to the past appreciated by the current generation. 

And maybe that’s it, too. Most big team sports are barely recognisable now from what went 30-40 years before. In rugby’s case the difference is particularly pronounced for no reason more complex than the game has gone from amateur to pro. 

So much of the Lions seems rooted in days when men gave their kids, aged five and seven, a firm handshake and came back when they were seven and nine with a suntan and a lifetime’s worth of war stories.    

Often you’d imagine the Lions tour would go the way of the FA Cup, or the Railway Cup, its myths and romance best suited to other centuries. 

Maybe there was less of a need to preserve in football which was pretty much always professional, and the GAA remains notionally amateur, at least from a player’s point of view. 

But rugby is a whole different ball game – and perhaps for that reason it holds onto its old staples. The Barbarians may be a long-ailing concept but the Lions remains cherished. The more removed we become from the old days the more important it becomes; something simple and time-honoured which brings a bit of joy to fans and players, imbues them with memories and reminds them of why they got to love the game in the first place. If that doesn’t matter then not much in sport does. 

And so every four years it’s back and, to misappropriate Alex Turner, ready to make its way through the sludge and smash through the glass ceiling . . . it will never die and there’s nothing you can do about it.