Sometimes, nothing really makes any sense. Writing a 25-year old’s obituary, for example. If you follow a template, an obituary’s structural template, you must first give notice of a death, followed by its cause and then include a brief bio of the deceased person. But how do you do that, the give-notice-and-cause part, when until a moment before he slipped into unconsciousness – a state he never awoke from – Phil Hughes was batting on 63, just playing a sport?

A non-contact sport, no less. A gentleman’s game.

And what do you put in the ‘brief bio’ bit? That Hughes’s there-again-off-again form never really lived up to his talent as he played out a largely unfulfilled career of just 26 Tests? But does that even matter on a day when his life has been cut short, abrupt and unfulfilled, three days before he would have turned 26?

How about a personal anecdote, then? An anecdote that celebrates his smile, that quintessential Aussie-from-the-bush smile. Will that help in any way to comprehend this most incomprehensible tragedy? Perhaps not. But it sure does capture the essence of the man that was Phillip Joel Hughes.

On India’s last tour of Australia, I found myself wandering down central Sydney in search of a drink along with a former colleague, Karthik Krishnaswamy. Being a Saturday night, Karthik and I weren’t the only thirsty ones. Most pubs in the area were crowded, one was particularly so – spilling out a fair number of drunk jocks on to the street outside. And they were all (without exception) heckling a woefully out-of-form Phil Hughes, who was parked by the kerb.

“Score as many runs as my fingers and we’ll let you in,” screamed one drunk, who had three digits hoisted in the air. “Hughesy, my grandma bats better than you,” yelled another. It was intense stuff, typical herd behaviour – heckling, mocking, laughing, jeering. Hughes just sat in the backseat of his car and soaked it all in. At some point, when the driver tried to reason with the insane and got sucked into the gathering (“You really work for this guy?”), we, Karthik and I, asked Hughes just what was going on. “Apparently you need runs to get a beer these days,” he said.

Then he shrugged, winked and smiled. A true, warm, I-can-take-care-of-this-buddy smile.

If runs were always the criteria to enter an Aussie bar, then Hughes would’ve had several running-tabs all over Sydney at the beginning of his international career. After his first full Test series, away in South Africa no less, he was averaging 69.16. A duck and a 75 in the first Johannesburg Test was followed by 115 and 160 in Durban, making him the youngest, at 20, to strike twins tons in a Test match.

The fall came quickly, during the very next Test series Australia played — the 2009 Ashes in England. Andrew Flintoff had a plan, Hughes didn’t. It was that simple, though for a kid from a banana farm in interior New South Wales to taste so much success so quickly and not have regular spoonfuls of it wasn’t.

Here began his in-again-out-again relationship with the Australian side, but his team-mates will be the first to tell you (as they have so often in the last 48 hours) that that smile never went away – not when he made way for the next guy, not when he scored eight runs spread over five innings and 82 balls on the Test tour of India in 2013, each time being outwitted by a spinner.

Just three days back, Hughes had found form again, scoring 63 unbeaten runs at the Sydney Cricket Ground. That form and those runs would’ve given him access to any drinking hole of his choice down the road from the ground, and more significantly access to take on the Indians in the first Test in Brisbane next week. But that’s where it all stops making sense. Because then he missed one pull shot, one silly swish of a cricket bat, and we had to write his obituary. Or talk about his smile in past tense.