Cricket is a game of statistics and history and those with brains built for accounting love nothing more than to trawl the record books, uncovering the threads that connect cricketers across the continents and between the eras, comparing the tallies and assigning designations accordingly.

It is a reductive pursuit, but one that all cricketers accept as necessary to ensure the sport’s pecking order is constantly reviewed and updated, that the milestones are marked and measured, that there can be no argument about who belongs in the list of all-timers and the sub-categories that cascade from the doorstep of the sport’s pantheon.

When all is said and done, Tim Southee will finish his career as a collection of numbers, arranged in columns and searchable in descending or ascending order. The numbers in the wickets column, as a pace bowler in tests, will be second only to those of New Zealand’s very best, whose own figures are immortalised in the Hall of Fame, and on the medal presented every year to New Zealand’s best men’s cricketer, and on a personalised plate on a black SUV.

Southee’s numbers in all formats for New Zealand are unrivalled and may well never be bettered. In all formats, Southee has taken 774 wickets. Of the current mob, Mitchell Santner is closest – a mere 479 wickets behind.

In Test matches, he stands up to international scrutiny. There are very few players who have taken 350 wickets and 50 catches and made 2000 runs. There’s Southee, then there is Stuart Broad, Anil Kumble, Shane Warne, Kapil Dev, Daniel Vettori, Shaun Pollock, and Baron Botham of Ravensworth. That’s some kind of list.

In a couple of days, Southee’s numbers will be final. There will be no adding, or subtracting, or augmenting with asterisks. There can be no argument that he belongs on any number of lists, and cricket’s tumble of numbers can be muscled and massaged into an endless array of those. He has hit 98 sixes, for instance, which is the same number as Chris Gayle, the Universe Boss, and Southee should not, according to history and tradition, be equal on any list with Gayle.

And that’s cricket for you. And that’s Southee for you. And as this column comes together in the commentary box that looks out from the Southee end in the final hours of the second day of his final Test, the shadows of Seddon Park light towers creep across the ornamental turf, marking the reliable approach of dusk and Southee’s inevitable march into the sunset of his Test career.

Southee will be his numbers and his numbers will be his career, but he should be remembered for more than that. He should be remembered as a rosy-cheeked kid from the farm in Waiotira, in the rural north who announced himself to the world with a performance that made a promise. In cricket, there are many promises made but very few are kept. Southee made sure he did keep that promise – that’s enough to mark him as one of the best to do it for this country.

He should be remembered for the vociferous appeals, arms outstretched, teeth bared and back bent, for the one that nipped back off the seam and trapped the man in front, for the safe pair of hands in the slips cordon, and the way he stuffed them in his pockets between deliveries on cold days in Wellington. He should be remembered for being one half of Southee and Boult, and one third of Southee and Boult and Wagner.

He should be remembered for the faded black cap, and a comical review record, and for the way he would smile at good fortune and bad; for the times he got the ball to talk through the air and reverse on sunburnt afternoons; for the way he walked away from the captaincy when the writing was on the wall, and for the way nothing meant more to him than playing for his country – nothing, that is, except family, both the one that made him and the one he helped create.

There may be three more days, maybe two. There may be no more days after this one. Whenever this test ends, Southee’s Test career ends with it. Out the window of the commentary box above the Tim Southee End of Seddon Park, we watch the ground staff cover the pitch, and water the block. The crowds have left, and New Zealand leads by 340 runs. More numbers have been added, lists have been updated, milestones marked and immortalised in television graphics.

Southee remains eleven wickets short of 400. The shadows grow longer still.