Sometimes, you can have too much of a good thing. Watching the second Ashes Test was like gorging on chocolate cake for three and a half days.
By the end, England had won by 44 yards (two runs, in official parlance), a hoarse Edgbaston crowd had run out of songs, the watching media had run out of superlatives and Michael Vaughan needed a break.
His side, he said, would savour the victory but then take two days off to regain their equilibrium. "If you think cricket all the time, your brain will get dazed," he said.
Everyone was in a daze on Sunday as one of the most enthralling, roller-coaster games in history reached its classic climax.
Michael Kasprowicz, caught by Geraint Jones off the bowling of Steve Harmison, and Australia, set 282 to win, had fallen one scoring shot short after an improbably courageous fightback.
The second-best side in the world had beaten the world champions by the narrowest winning margin in Ashes history to keep the series alive.
Vaughan resorted to the word "epic". Had England gone 2-0 down rather than levelled at 1-1, he conceded, "I don't think we would have come back". The sense of disappointment would have been simply too devastating.
'NERVE-WRACKING'
Ponting, having watched Australia's last two wickets score 104 runs on the fourth morning, said it was "probably the most nerve-wracking end to a Test I have ever played in".
| |||||||||||
The result was hugely important to the series.
Had England lost, with the soccer season underway, Ashes coverage would have been left fighting for space with tales of Chelsea's latest rouble-fuelled signing and David Beckham's newest haircut.
The third Test at Old Trafford, however, will now get its due.
Edgbaston probably outdid any previous Ashes Test in terms of non-stop excitement, the game played at a furious pace and ebbing one way, then the other.
Day one opened with Australia's premium fast bowler Glenn McGrath, fresh from passing 500 Test wickets at Lord's and who had predicted a 5-0 series whitewash, stepping on a stray cricket ball and missing the game with a damaged ankle.
Then came Ponting's surprising decision to bowl first. By the close England had clobbered 10 sixes, 54 fours and 407 runs.
Day two and Ashley Giles, indignant over calls to drop him after the first Test, had helped secure England a 99-run lead. Andrew Flintoff polished off the innings with two Waqar Younis-style inswinging yorkers.
England batted again in the evening and, with one over to go, were cruising.
Within minutes, the mood had been transformed. Shane Warne, defying the rules of geometry, castled the left-handed Andrew Strauss with a ball which turned more than two feet. It was Mike Gatting and 1993 all over again.
English batsmen went to bed with leg-spinning demons for company that night and by lunch on Saturday the home side were tottering on 95 for six.
Re-enter Flintoff. As the wickets fell, he rocked back and clubbed Brett Lee for a succession of sixes as difficult to comprehend as Warne's wizardry.
He made 73, to add to his blitzed 68 in the first innings, and put on 51 for the last wicket with Simon Jones. In total, Flintoff hit nine sixes in the game, an Ashes record.
Then, when Australia batted again, he produced what he considered himself the best over of his career.
Justin Langer played on facing Flintoff's second ball - had it been his first, Flintoff could have claimed a hat-trick over two innings -- and Ponting survived two big lbw shouts from booming inswingers before edging an outswinger to the wicketkeeper.
HARMISON'S BEST
The day ended in further home jubilation. Harmison, another English brute bowling at around 90mph, produced probably the best ball he will ever bowl, a perfectly disguised yorker at two thirds of his normal speed. Michael Clarke, a fine talent, played early and was bowled.
Australia began the last day on 175 for eight, needing 107. It seemed all over bar the Barmy Army shouting.
But Warne, who hit 42 before somehow stepping onto his own stumps, Lee, with 43 not out, and Kasprowicz, with 20, chanced their arms, refused to flinch, survived a string of close calls and came within a whisker of the impossible.
England rejoiced and the rest of the cricket world, tiring of Australian dominance, will too.
Ponting was offered to opportunity to join the chorus. Surely a contest was better than an English flattening, he was asked? "I would rather be flattening England," he replied. "At least I would have a few fingernails left."
The Edgbaston crowd melted away on Sunday in a state of near shock. Kasprowicz felt the same, contemplating a dismissal, a leg-side gloved catch, which he said would stay with him for the rest of his life.
In relative terms, Harmison's match-settling delivery had been no better than average.
The most significant ball of the game, however, all things considered, was probably the one that McGrath contrived to step on before it all started.
