There are days when the longest form of the game seems destined for the scrapheap, patronised by players who proclaim its pre-eminence while lining up another DLF Maximum and administrators who arrange two Tests at a time and have the nerve to call them a series.
And then there are days like Monday.
If we're honest, Test cricket got a bit lucky in Cardiff on Monday. England took the only course available to them and Sri Lanka, a team who refused to donate even a single wicket to Andrew Strauss's men in the recent World Cup quarter-final in Colombo, responded by rolling over and having their tummies tickled.
Strauss was decent enough to call it a 'bonus'. But that's what Test cricket does: it gets lucky sometimes. And when it gets lucky, there is no game in the world, let alone its 50- or 20-over cousin, that can touch it.
England's heist, enacted in less than a couple of hours, may have felt like a spot of office-party slap and tickle after the prolonged love affair of an Ashes winter, but there you have it: a game that confounds us all is a game to be treasured and nurtured.
For this, England deserve more credit than Sri Lanka (just as, incidentally, Sri Lanka deserve more credit than England for producing cricketers capable of lighting up a one-day international).
While England were professional enough to maintain their enthusiasm until the very end of a game in which the rain had threatened to dilute everyone else's, Sri Lanka batted like a team who felt the injustice of being asked to play in blustery, wet Wales in May had been rightly counteracted by the weather.
If they were keen to fight it out for the draw, no one let on. The tone, as they say, was set early on.
Before the game Sri Lanka's batting coach Marvan Atapattu claimed the Tests would prepare his side well for the five-match one-day series that follows.
And yet Atapattu, as Test-specific a batsman as Sri Lanka can have produced, was merely toeing the line. This, remember, was their first Test outside Asia for three years.
More than that, their two best players – Kumar Sangakkara and Mahela Jayawardene – both joined the tour party late in order to fulfil their Indian Premier League commitments. They managed a total of 44 runs between them.
The extent to which the IPL continues to impinge on Test cricket on the one hand while publicly professing its gratitude to its old master on the other is nauseating enough.
But when two of the world's best batsmen are not properly acclimatised for a series between, according to the rankings, the third and fourth best sides in the game, you wonder about the point of it all.
And yet England were, mainly, terrific. They got away with their own, smaller, IPL gamble because, a) Eoin Morgan knows local conditions well enough by now, and b) he was barely needed anyway.
But, after a slightly faltering start with the ball, they played to their strengths like a side with a clear vision of the path ahead.
Alastair Cook and Jonathan Trott performed like men who now know their minds better than any pair of international batsmen – they have overtaken Hashim Amla and Jacques Kallis in this regard – while Chris Tremlett, pitching the ball further up second time round, and Graeme Swann made the loss of Jimmy Anderson look like a mere inconvenience.
Perhaps most hearteningly of all, England's dominance – when the weather allowed – over the last three days stuck two fingers up at the notion that anything post-Ashes would by definition be a comedown.
Challengingly, they had to create their own atmosphere on the final afternoon, as Strauss admitted later, because the Swalec Stadium contained only a couple of hundred spectators. England did what good sportsmen do: they roused themselves.
There is a sense of unity now which can't merely be put down by a collective desire to get one over the Australians. Even the timing of the declaration told its own tale.
This observer was not alone in wondering whether the decision to give Ian Bell the chance to score the two runs he needed for his hundred lacked the ruthlessness the situation demanded.
But Strauss made a fair point afterwards when he said he wanted the whole team to take the field for Sri Lanka's second innings with a spring in their step. No repetition here of Graeme Hick's morale-sapping 98 not out at Sydney in 1994-95.
England's Test team is currently getting most of the little things right, and they are beginning to add up: that's three innings wins now in a row, and four in five. Watch them while you can.
And then there are days like Monday.
If we're honest, Test cricket got a bit lucky in Cardiff on Monday. England took the only course available to them and Sri Lanka, a team who refused to donate even a single wicket to Andrew Strauss's men in the recent World Cup quarter-final in Colombo, responded by rolling over and having their tummies tickled.
What a day: England celebrate winning the first Test by an innings and 14 runs in Cardiff
England's heist, enacted in less than a couple of hours, may have felt like a spot of office-party slap and tickle after the prolonged love affair of an Ashes winter, but there you have it: a game that confounds us all is a game to be treasured and nurtured.
For this, England deserve more credit than Sri Lanka (just as, incidentally, Sri Lanka deserve more credit than England for producing cricketers capable of lighting up a one-day international).
Through the gate: Swann dismissed Thilan Samaraweera for a duck in Sri Lanka's second innings
If they were keen to fight it out for the draw, no one let on. The tone, as they say, was set early on.
Before the game Sri Lanka's batting coach Marvan Atapattu claimed the Tests would prepare his side well for the five-match one-day series that follows.
Gone! Sangakkara was dismissed for just 14 runs after Strauss caught the Sri Lanka batsman off the bowling of Swann
More than that, their two best players – Kumar Sangakkara and Mahela Jayawardene – both joined the tour party late in order to fulfil their Indian Premier League commitments. They managed a total of 44 runs between them.
The extent to which the IPL continues to impinge on Test cricket on the one hand while publicly professing its gratitude to its old master on the other is nauseating enough.
But when two of the world's best batsmen are not properly acclimatised for a series between, according to the rankings, the third and fourth best sides in the game, you wonder about the point of it all.
And yet England were, mainly, terrific. They got away with their own, smaller, IPL gamble because, a) Eoin Morgan knows local conditions well enough by now, and b) he was barely needed anyway.
But, after a slightly faltering start with the ball, they played to their strengths like a side with a clear vision of the path ahead.
Alastair Cook and Jonathan Trott performed like men who now know their minds better than any pair of international batsmen – they have overtaken Hashim Amla and Jacques Kallis in this regard – while Chris Tremlett, pitching the ball further up second time round, and Graeme Swann made the loss of Jimmy Anderson look like a mere inconvenience.
Perhaps most hearteningly of all, England's dominance – when the weather allowed – over the last three days stuck two fingers up at the notion that anything post-Ashes would by definition be a comedown.
Challengingly, they had to create their own atmosphere on the final afternoon, as Strauss admitted later, because the Swalec Stadium contained only a couple of hundred spectators. England did what good sportsmen do: they roused themselves.
Not in their droves: The final day's play was watched by only a couple of hundred people in Cardiff
This observer was not alone in wondering whether the decision to give Ian Bell the chance to score the two runs he needed for his hundred lacked the ruthlessness the situation demanded.
But Strauss made a fair point afterwards when he said he wanted the whole team to take the field for Sri Lanka's second innings with a spring in their step. No repetition here of Graeme Hick's morale-sapping 98 not out at Sydney in 1994-95.
England's Test team is currently getting most of the little things right, and they are beginning to add up: that's three innings wins now in a row, and four in five. Watch them while you can.
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