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Few recall the concluding moment of the Ashes. It's the first that's famous. That errant delivery that goes to the slips, that elegant shot for four, that fallen stump, shattering the stumps! Last balls? I needed to check. Ali edging a shot behind to finish an innings defeat in a meaningless match in 2015; Rankin being taken at slip off Ryan Harris, Boyd Rankin playing in his single Test at the conclusion of a 30-over collapse in a comprehensive defeat that's been full of them in 2014; a Steve Harmison bouncer glancing off Justin Langer's shoulder for runs, the single four Australia score in a pursuit they'll not undertake in 2005.

It distinguishes between speculating how things will go, and seeing how they do. One certainty is, there's no guarantee there will be a positive outcome. For the last decade, England's trips Down Under have ended in ashes, as opposed to with them. Andy Flower was removed as coach after an embarrassing rout, in 2013-14, Silverwood lost his after another, in 2021-22. You can make a couple of teams out of England players who featured in their final Test match at the tail end of an Australian tour during the previous 25 years, and still have a couple of men over to serve as reserves for both teams.

The current English side have never claimed to worry excessively about consequences. Stokes, like Eoin Morgan with the limited-overs team before him, always says that whether or not a aerial shot is caught on the boundary matters less as whether it was the right decision to play it in the first place, and while fielding he's happy to clap a bowler who concedes runs so long as they bringing the team nearer to taking that following breakthrough. But then the key rationale Ben Stokes tried to instruct his squad to adopt this approach was so they would be in a superior situation to produce the style of play he thinks will do well for them in Australia.

The upcoming Ashes, for which they have been planning extensively, already seems like the conclusion they can't get away from. It is this aggressive approach's decisive moment. And there are an abundance of warnings of defeat in the national sport for the team to escape criticism if they do endure a further bad defeat in the next few weeks. The captain's strategy has been predicated on defying expectations, and the other side is it appears there are plenty of people who would be thrilled to be shown right.

Considering this, it's a suitable occasion to highlight that the important question is not only where this all ends up, but whether or not we enjoyed it along the way. Four years ago, the English team were an thoroughly poor cricket team. They had been overcome in a quartet of successive tournaments and were trailing in the final one, against the Indian team, when it was halted because of Covid. They had won exactly one Test match out of seventeen, and lost a dozen of them by humiliating deficits. Eight wickets to the Kiwis at the Birmingham ground, A defeat by 157 runs to the subcontinent team at the the London ground, an innings and 14 runs to the Aussie team at Melbourne, 10 wickets to the Caribbean side in the island nation.

England were thrashed 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 months of nasal swabs and social distancing and biosecure bubbles and repeated losses at the hands of everyone they played, they were practically the most disheartened and weary Test team England had ever sent out to a cricket field. So much of what Stokes and McCullum have done in the years since was in response to all that, as well as the former's experiences during his time away from the game in 2021 when he had experienced a period of mental health challenges. It was designed to emphasize to all that it was intended as enjoyable, if it was meant to be something.

It still is now. Despite when the the historic series is on the line, and even if the team have finally recognized that they need to be a little more flexible in the way they tackle competing. Daily routines has a way of imposing, it can be hard to remember the insights we gain in our lowest moments.

Here is the England team that achieved back-to-back run chases of three challenging targets in one summer against New Zealand; that achieved a massive 378 to beat India that same summer; that became the initial visiting side to win a clean sweep in the subcontinent country; that fought back to a tie after going 2-0 down in the the series; that defeated the Indian team in the historic venue off the back of one of the finest batting displays ever played in the the area, and then defeated Pakistan in the city off the back of a further exceptional performance.

Here we have the English squad, too, that managed to end up suffering a defeat in a Test by an large margin even though the other team made only 326; who concluded losing one of the more exciting matches ever staged after making a cocksure declaration in the opening session against the Black Caps, and then repeated the action against the Aussies; who were thrashed by a huge margin in the Indian city, and who were on the wrong end of one of the island nation's most notable triumphs. As a unit, they have secured some of the unlikeliest wins, experienced some of the ugliest dismissals, achieved some of the surprising hundreds, and taken some of the most surprising five-fers in the history of the national sport.

Regardless of how this historic contest shakes out, they have been, in turn, amazing, preposterous, unconventional, frustrating, and entirely, unrepentantly, unapologetically entertaining.