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As sure as night follows day, there would be a tinge of anticlimax in the first session of the third Test match. The walkways linking the city of Adelaide to its oval were lined with banners reminding spectators that they were witnesses to history. Speculation over the behaviour of the pink ball was so fervid that it would have been no surprise if the thing had exploded like a novelty golf ball.
Instead the moment felt, well, precedented. New Zealand's Brendon McCullum won the toss and did what captains do in Adelaide. He would not be fooled by the colour of the ball or the waving fields of long grass on a playing surface designed to preserve it. He batted, as 65 of 73 previous Test captains had done here. (Of the eight who bowled first, only Clive Lloyd 34 years ago had a win.)
As Shane Warne opined, this Test match is "unique, but not that unique". Mitchell Starc's indifferent first over broke the ice, and in the afternoon sunshine the pink ball was no easier or harder to see than a red one.
After all the excitement, this was feeling like ... a Test match. Josh Hazlewood dropped onto a needling length, and the cricket soon found a tempo that was, compared with the breakneck scoring in Brisbane and Perth, traditional.
The grass on the pitch conduced to neither swing nor seam. Instead, it gave the bowlers spongey but steep bounce, the so-called tennis-ball trajectory, similar to the drop-in's first day demeanour in the Ashes Test match here two years ago. The outfield was also slow enough to give the fielders a fighting chance to chase down balls that had scooted away from them at the Gabba and the WACA.
Through sound, persistent, intelligent bowling the Australians gradually tightened their hold. Hazlewood trapped Martin Guptill with a full ball that would almost have climbed over the bails. Peter Siddle, introduced in the seventh over, was good to his threat to bore the New Zealanders out. Siddle entered the match two wickets short of Jeff Thomson's 200.
Two more contrasting Australian fast bowlers cannot be imagined, but one thing Siddle and Thomson have had in common was the tendency to take wickets for the bowler at the other end. Thomson did so by creating emotional tumult, whereas Siddle has operated by sedation. One a mad butcher, the other an anaesthetist. Kane Williamson's rhythm had been imperturbable in Brisbane and Perth. Here, all of a sudden, put to sleep by Siddle, he popped up a dinky half-drive off Nathan Lyon, his first false shot of the series, and was then becalmed for half an hour before Starc pinned him from around the wicket as precisely as a lepidopterist with a butterfly. Throughout, the unsung man at the other end, causing the build-up of frustration, was Siddle.
In time, Siddle grabbed a key wicket of his own, interrupting Ross Taylor's run of form with a nagging investigation culminating in an inside edge. It was reminiscent of Siddle's bowling to Kevin Pietersen in 2013-14, and Australia's overall bowling effort brought back the main strengths of that series: patience, patience, and when that failed, more patience. It is a mode of cricket that has served Australia well on slow pitches.
Only when they got over-excited about their fast bowling, and departed from the basics, have they stumbled. Siddle was a mainstay of the Australian grind, and since Ryan Harris's retirement would seem to have become more rather than less important.
And yet, after his heroics at The Oval, this was only his second appearance post-Harris. There's probably a lesson in there, but the recent past suggests it will continue to go unheeded.
In any case, the afternoon supplied some good old-fashioned competitive Test cricket, with a balance between bat and ball: historic, like the churches you can't see from the oval any more.
But the occasion was always about the night more than the day, the Kath more than the Kel. The crowd grew steadily as the sun fell, the ticket prices were lowered for late entry, and there was a sense of anticipation, as if the first two sessions were just a prelude. Adelaide, city of lights, town that never sleeps? That would feel like something entirely new.
