For Phillip Hughes' family, friends and fellow cricketers, it is impossible to fathom how they will meet their grief.

For current players, I honestly cannot guess what reserves they will have to draw upon to play the game again and honour their mate. But mental strength is what has got them to where they are, and Australian cricket has always been resilient and forward-looking.

As spectators, we draw consolation from what we know. I began to think of what I most enjoyed in Hughes' cricket, and thought that if I wanted to commemorate him in my cricket brain, I would rename the cut shot.

Thinking of Hughes' most notable innings for Australia - his Test centuries in Durban and Pallekele, his unbeaten 81 in Nottingham, his one-day hundred on debut in Melbourne - doesn't quite do him justice, because each high point is tinged by the knowledge that it was soon followed by a reversal.

All of the numbers in his career draw in to a point at the number 63, which will never be the same for Australian cricket folk. Sixty-three is forever Hughes', the place where he was stopped but not out.

The memories remain, however. His potential has been taken away, but his cut shot has not.

Thinking of the great left-handed cutters, there is no one comparable. Hughes was hardly David Gower, the Oscar Wilde of the stroke, whose execution was as sly as a cutting comment.

Brian Lara and Clive Lloyd bludgeoned the ball as it passed them on the off-side, but their brutality also had a baton-twirler's dexterity.

Among the right-handers, Dean Jones cut with the same emphatic bottom hand as Hughes, but he, like Mark Waugh and Ricky Ponting, played the shot with balance and authority, up on the toes.

Hughes was more edge-of-the-seat. His daring had shades of Doug Walters and his tightrope footwork, but Hughes had little footwork at all; a characteristic of his cut shot was that he often swung himself off his feet, his front leg splaying out towards mid-wicket as a counterweight.

If the ball was too close, he arched his back to give himself more room. If further away, he launched arms, bat and body at it. His cut shot was all the more memorable for being just a little out of control. It was outrageous and joyful, and he never stopped wanting to play it.

Allan Border was another short left-hander who loved to cut. But Border left a lot of short balls, only cutting in his zone, whereas Hughes was compulsive.

So willing to chase that off-side short ball, he revelled in whole new varieties of the cut shot: the flay over the backward-point boundary, the arched-back ramp cut over slips, the flat spank through cover point, as well as the more traditional square and late cuts.

He batted like a man who was sweating on the ball to cut, and it sometimes seemed that his other shots were an adjustment or a disappointment, a resignation to the reality that he couldn't cut everything.

Bowlers may have conceived varying plans where to bowl to him, but they all knew where not to bowl. Putting it short outside the off-stump to Hughes meant four runs or, with spectacular frequency, six.

Cutting is what chefs do, and knights. Hughes' cut shot was straight off the banana plantation. Because he was so compulsive, he was compelling to watch.

Overdoing the cut shot is often seen as a reckless indulgence. Professionals resist it; in England, they say "Never cut before lunch". Hughes never heard that one.

But as with all unorthodox players, when it backfired his cut shot looked ugly, and of course it was sometimes his downfall.

In his first Test innings, Hughes wanted to cut so much, probably to allay his nerves, he flung himself at the fourth ball he faced, a high Dale Steyn bouncer, and got himself out.

But he might have heard the story of what Don Bradman said to another great left-handed cutter, Neil Harvey, long after their careers ended: "I could have told you to stop playing it, because it got you out occasionally, but I would have robbed you of thousands of runs". And robbed spectators of the joie de vivre with which such batsmen have shared their game.

Hughes had other shots, which he had to develop once bowlers realised the folly of feeding his cut. He improved his defence, which you sensed he hadn't needed much as a kid, and his on-side play grew better and better, always in the search for more runs.

Greg Baum has floated a guess that is too beautiful not to be repeated: that Hughes' last thought, as he went to hook Sean Abbott's bouncer in Sydney, was "Here's four runs".

Had the ball been a little wider on the off-side, it would surely have resulted in just another Phil Hughes cut shot for four, and the gully fieldsman would have been jogging to the gutter to fetch the ball instead of sprinting in to the crease.

I have just heard about the number of Sydney junior cricketers who are playing with black armbands this weekend. Another surprise attack.

Is a cut shot anything more than a person swishing a stick at a ball? Maybe not. Maybe it's just ephemera. But watching the most gifted among us strive to master something extremely difficult, sometimes managing it and sometimes falling short, lifts and strengthens the human spirit.

Whether sport is delighting us or frustrating us, making us cheer our lungs out or grind our teeth, driving us mad or boring us witless or making us cry, it is at all of those moments connecting us. Every bit as much as a great novel or painting or piece of music, something as simple as one unique young batsman's signature shot can turn itself into our connective tissue.

It can also, when recalled in a certain way, dry our tears.