We all know that picture - Nelson Mandela, Francois Pienaar, the World Cup and those identical Springbok No.6 shirts. And that's the trouble. It is so iconic that it is tough to distinguish what you really saw and thought at the time from what we have learnt since.
Was there really a collective intake of breath, followed by cheering, as the crowd realised that Mandela had pitched up in Pienaar's shirt ? Or is that something from Invictus ?
But I can recall for sure the gasp as a South African Airways jumbo flew so low over Ellis Park that it seemed to block out the sky, and the joyous a capella singing of Nkosi Sikele'i Afrika before kick-off. South Africa's heritage of music and dance made this one World Cup at which ceremonial was a pleasure rather than an ordeal.
All World Cups are memorable, but this one was in a class by itself. If the option existed, this is the one I'd do again.
All World Cups are defined by their context, but again none quite like this. South Africa was little more than a year emerged from a vicious and unnatural political system. It offered experiences like talking to a rugby-playing opposition senator whose critique of the government gave way to unqualified admiration for their lack of vengefulness. We sat in Parliament below a huge painting commemorating the passage of the apartheid-era Group Areas Act which most new regimes would have buried in the archives, or burnt.
There was a day with rugby league coach Dave Sullivan in Alexandria, most deprived of Johannesburg's informal settlements. That the kids were bright, engaging and loved the sport was no different to anywhere - the true wonder was parents who somehow turned them out spotless from shanties with no running water.
And there was the telling testimony of Alexandria's sports activists about the attitude of governing bodies to non-white South Africa. "The cricket board said 'tell us what we should be doing." The Transvaal Rugby Union said "We're doing this. Do you want to work with us?"
There was a memorable night-time drive around Johannesburg with the novelist Justin Cartwright, a native. And my first ever car crash at, I kid you not, Rorke's Drift.
South Africa offered numerous complexities. Rustenberg was a mining community of alleged hard-line sympathies. Yet its fans gave tumultuous support to easily the blackest team in the tournament, Ivory Coast. It was not just that the Ivorians were underdogs. More than that, they were fellow Africans.
They deserved much better than to fall victim to the worst moment of this, or any other World Cup - the injury that left Max Brito, an ebullient, hard-tackling winger, paralysed for life. Rugby players, and fans, are inured to quite serious injuries. But, as with Mervyn Davies's stroke in 1976, there was the silent chill of terror which comes with the truly life-threatening incident.
Two narratives converged inexorably. There were the Boks - and one thing which Invictus nails is the extent to which the fame of Pienaar and Chester Williams stood out even above great players like Andre Joubert, Mark Andrews, Joost van der Westhuizen and the incomparable Ruben Kruger. Williams's eyes became a tournament symbol staring from unlikely billboards like the side of aircraft. Pienaar, a man of charm and self-possession, could still be embarrassed years later by questions about playing the Billy Crystal role in an advert based around the fake orgasm scene from When Harry Met Sally.
The Bokke had an air of destiny. The semi-final against France in Durban was accompanied by seven inches of rain in 24 hours. It was the least postponable game in the competition, with every plane in the county on the tarmac at Durban airport, ready to fly to Cape Town for the other semi, between England and New Zealand. Typically of South Africa, means of drying the surface mixed first and third world - helicopters and a team of black women with brooms.
Somehow it was played after a long delay, in conditions which suited only Andrews, a water polo enthusiast. Somehow French flanker Abdel Benazzi was halted inches from a match-stealing try. The French might have complained that the game was played at all, and of the strokes of luck they lacked. They did not. And somehow it was reported upon, even though the Durban press box is open air and neither computers nor pen and paper work in downpours.
Then, on an inevitable collision course with the Boks, there were the All Blacks, and Jonah Lomu. This was the moment when they shifted stylistically from cudgel to rapier, but Lomu had elements of both. As Wales's Wayne Proctor, giving away about six inches and 40kg, put it: "He's not exactly your conventional winger. I got as close as I could, then I discovered that he could sidestep."
Lomu's four tries crushed England in the other semi on a crystal clear day in Cape Town. It would have been five, but with Lomu in space outside him Andrew Mehrtens evidently concluded that it would be too boringly easily and instead dropped a goal - New Zealand's second, following No.8 Zinzan Brooke's whimsical early effort from the touchline.
South African has many languages but seemingly only one subject of conversation in the week before the final. Could the Boks stop Lomu? They did it by stopping the men inside him, as 100 minutes of ratcheting tension led to Joel Stransky's drop-goal. Pienaar, a good player, performed like a great one.
New Zealand, afflicted by food-poisoning, might have complained. But Sean Fitzpatrick, perhaps the most competitive human alive in 1995, personified the gracious loser. Perhaps he knew the pointlessness of arguing against historical destiny, not least from the news the night before: the announcement of the southern hemisphere's Super Rugby programme, effectively ending the amateur era.
After the tournament, journalists were asked who would win the 1999 World Cup. One of our number was sure - "Rupert Murdoch."