Why? A team that has long prided itself on being the fittest in the business gave the All Blacks a fair old fright for 70 minutes only to capitulate in the final ten.
How can that happen to a squad of players who have been in camp for a whole month? In South Africa last summer, they led the Springboks by six points until the 78th minute and contrived to give away a penalty try.
The apologists trotted out the usual guff about heroic performances, moral victories and bad luck. A fortnight ago Wales were beating the Wallabies with seven minutes left and lost for the tenth time in a row.
And then came last night and the most alarming example not so much of losing but coming apart at the seams. The grim reality is that once the All Blacks went into overdrive, Wales were simply not fit to live with them.
What conclusion can be drawn from all that other than they do not have the capacity, physically perhaps as well as mentally, to go for as long as it takes – the full 80.
For a management team as ambitious as Gatland’s, there really is no consolation to be found in the Welsh contribution, no matter how mighty because it stopped ten minutes before the scheduled close.
An evening when Wales raised the roof often enough to suggest that the severe tide of history might at long last turn in their favour offered the fleeting prospect that at long last this would be their Buster Douglas moment.
An incident in the 67th minute raised fresh hope that the country responsible for the most one-sided fixture in the history book would be flattened just as Douglas, the 42-1 underdog, had flattened the hitherto unbeatable Mike Tyson in the Tokyo Dome almost a quarter of a century ago.
Richie McCaw’s illegal entry into a ruck from the side instead of through the gate of the hindmost foot invited the unflappable Leigh Halfpenny to drill his third penalty and put Wales ahead for the third time at 16-15.
Three minutes later, they were still holding on. After 61 years without a win, it had come down to hanging on to what they had for ten minutes and then the brutal reality dawned. In the next seven they conceded 19 points from three tries, the first a rare beauty as crafted by Beauden Barrett.
The All Black stand-off gave every impression during the opening half hour that the occasion would be too much for him. And then, when it mattered most, the real Beauden Barrett stood up, just as he had done with a cross-kick of sheer perfection for Jerome Kaino to nose the All Blacks in front only for Wales to respond by forcing McCaw to concede what could have been the fateful penalty.
Just as they almost invariably do, the world champions held their nerve and played their way out of trouble, as they had done most fortuitously in Dublin this time last year.
Barrett’s dart along the right touchline, the most exquisite of chips without breaking stride and before Wales knew what had them he was in behind the posts.
Whether the excellent Halfpenny ought to have adhered to the time-honoured dictum of never letting the ball bounce wherever possible is debatable. Once it had turned mockingly away from him at right angles, Wales went down like a lead balloon.
Mike Phillips took so long over a box kick that Kieran Read executed a simple charge down and followed up to scoop an equally simple try. With Wales out on their feet, they fell to another hanging diagonal kick, this time from Colin Slade for Barrett to seize Ben Smith’s acrobatic knock-down.
In a matter of seven minutes a ding-dong duel had dissolved into a rout. From New Zealand, theirs was the definitive example of a champion’s ruthless quality. It may sound cruel on Wales but at this level of sport any theories about hard luck are given very short shrift.
Certainly Wales will look back at their Buster Douglas moments, of Sam Warburton‘s careering break which floundered because no support reached him in time. And then there was George North‘s fresh air kick when a fumble by Sonny Bill Williams, one of many, gave him a clear run to the line if only he could have put a hacking right foot to the ball.
While North had a match to forget, Wales will draw some comfort from the fact that at times they rattled the Kiwis into recurring mistakes with Sonny Bill an almost serial offender when it came to the cardinal sin of knocking on.
For a period, Wales generated an intensity which the best team in the world found very hard to endure. The strange sight of Dan Carter in the novel role of water boy would have given the Welsh a psychological lift, especially when Barrett missed an early close-range penalty.
In the end there is no substitute for class. Wales have now conceded five or more tries to the All Blacks eleven times in 27 years with the majority of those matches in their citadel beside the Taff.
Some things never change.
*This article was first published in The Rugby Paper on November 23.