Ben Stokes' team have demonstrated us all that this great game is supposed to be fun.

People rarely mention the concluding moment of the Ashes. It's the first that's legendary. That errant delivery that goes to the slips, that elegant shot for four, that wicket, shattering the stumps! Final deliveries? I had to research them. Moeen Ali cutting a stroke behind to end an innings defeat in a inconsequential game in 2015; Boyd Rankin being caught in the slips off Harris, Boyd Rankin featuring in his single Test at the conclusion of a 30-over collapse in a clean sweep that's been commonplace in 2014; a Steve Harmison short ball deflecting off Justin Langer's shoulder for extras, the sole boundary Australia score in a run chase they'll never get to make in 2005.

It's the difference between questioning how things will go, and knowing how they do. One undeniable fact, there's no assurance there will be a happy ending. For the previous decade, England's visits to Australia have finished in defeat, rather than with them. Flower lost his job as coach after an embarrassing rout, in 2013-14, Silverwood was sacked after a subsequent one, in 2021-22. One could assemble a pair of XIs out of England players who featured in their final Test match at the tail end of an trip Down Under during the past 25 years, and even have a couple of men over to serve as reserves for each squad.

The current English side have not asserted to care too much about results. Stokes, like Morgan with the limited-overs team before him, frequently remarks that regardless of whether a aerial shot is caught on the boundary matters less as whether it was the right decision to play it in the outset, and while fielding he's happy to clap a delivery man who gives away boundaries so long as they are bringing the team toward taking that next wicket. But then the key rationale Stokes tried to instruct his squad to adopt this approach was so they would be in a better position to deliver the kind of cricket he feels will do well for them in Australia.

The forthcoming contest, for which they have been preparing for so long, already seems like the result they are bound to face. It is this bold strategy's decisive moment. And there are too many warnings of defeat in the English game for the team to escape criticism if they do experience another bad defeat in the next few weeks. Stokes's approach has been founded on proving everyone wrong, and the other side is it seems that there are many individuals who would be delighted to be proven correct.

In light of this, it's a good moment to point out that the important question is not only where this all ends up, but if we had fun along the way. In the recent past, England were an thoroughly poor sports team. They had been defeated in a quartet of successive tournaments and were lagging in the fifth, against the Indian team, when it was halted because of Covid. They had won a single Test match out of seventeen, and lost a dozen of them by large defeats. A loss by eight wickets to the Black Caps at Edgbaston, 157 runs to India at the Oval, an a comprehensive loss to the Australians at the MCG, 10 wickets to West Indies in the scenic location.

The English side was routed by the Caribbean team in Grenada in the early part of 2022 just before Joe Root stepped down as skipper.

By the conclusion, after all those stretches of testing and preventive measures and biosecure bubbles and repeated losses at the hands of each rival, they were virtually the most miserable and weary Test team England had ever put on to a cricket field. A significant portion of what Stokes and McCullum have achieved in the years since was in response to all that, as well as the former's experiences during his hiatus from the game in 2021 when he had experienced a bout of anxiety. It was designed to emphasize to all that it was intended as entertaining, if it was intended as something.

It still is now. Although the the prestigious contest is on the line, and even if the team have ultimately accepted that they need to be a somewhat adaptable in the way they go about competing. Everyday life has a way of imposing, it can be hard to retain the insights we gain in our toughest times.

This is the national side that secured consecutive run chases of three challenging targets in one season against New Zealand; that achieved a massive 378 to beat the subcontinent giants that corresponding period; that became the pioneering away squad to win a comprehensive victory in Pakistan; that showed resilience to a tie after going two games behind in the the contest; that beat India in Hyderabad off the back of one of the greatest innings ever played in the the region, and then overcame Pakistan in the city off the back of a subsequent one.

It is the English squad, too, that unexpectedly end up losing a Test by an large margin even though the rivals made only 326; who fetched up suffering a loss in one of the more exciting matches ever contested after making a confident decision in the opening session against the Black Caps, and then did the same thing against the Australian team; who were soundly beaten by a massive 434 runs in the Indian city, and who were on the losing side of one of the island nation's finest wins. Between them, they have recorded some of the most improbable victories, suffered some of the most embarrassing exits, made some of the surprising hundreds, and taken some of the most surprising exceptional bowling spells in the records of the national sport.

Regardless of how this Ashes series shakes out, they have been, one after another, astonishing, outrageous, absurd, frustrating, and completely, unapologetically, unashamedly thrilling.