Life rarely meets expectation. At around this time each year, those realisations come knocking with increasing frequency. Yes, you are fatter, poorer, wrinklier and less well-read than you would like to be. That fleeting aspiration in high school, that you might travel the world, or make a difference: for most, sorry to say, the optimism was misplaced.

So when a match of cricket delivers far beyond what fans could dream, it is worth celebrating. There can be no doubt that the Boxing Day Test was among sport’s finest moments. The most culturally significant annual sporting event in Australia, bringing together two rivals, ebbing and flowing right down to the ultimate hour of the final day. A victory that will forever now be associated with captain Pat Cummins and his peers, a loss sure to motivate a new generation of Indian cricketers.

Just today The Guardian published a list of Australia’s 10 biggest sporting moments of 2024. Although the calendar wouldn’t allow it, the article needed to wait another day. This five-day cricketing spectacular was at times funnier than Raygun. Fresher than Gout. Tougher than the Blues. Slyer than a Fox. Certainly, more unpredictable than Angeball.

So lasting is the match’s lustre, this is being written some 15 hours after the final wicket fell. And yet, still people will come to read, the headline and accompanying image igniting within Australians something irresistible. The world should have moved on. But this Test – in the minds of those who witnessed even just a ball – will long linger.

There were many such minds. In total 373,691 attended the MCG across the five days, a number “bigger than Bradman”, or at least the best-attended Test during the era of Australia’s greatest proponent.

These days Test cricket is in most countries played out in front of empty stadiums. The red ball remains a feature of the international calendar, for now, and the format of prestige for the game’s purest. But put simply, people don’t often come to watch it.

In that context, the turnout is absurd. The Boxing Day Test is traditionally the most popular Test in the Australian summer, but attracting even 200,000 has only been done five times in the past 40 years. This match exceeded the next highest tally – the 272,000 who came to watch the Ashes in 2013 – by more than 100,000.

But there is extra significance in its status now as the highest-attended Test ever in Australia. No longer is this merely a British outpost where beating the Old Enemy is the most compelling motivation in sport. Now, a modern Australia has a New Frenemy.

Much of the occasion – of the flags waving, the drums beating, the incessant noise – was thanks to Australia’s blue-clad Indian diaspora. This crowning glory of cricket was nothing without the infectious enthusiasm.

This amplified five days of drama, of moments that each seemed decisive until they weren’t. When Yashasvi Jaiswal, perhaps the next great Indian batter after Sachin Tendulkar and Virat Kohli, had dulled the new ball and frustrated the home side in a wicketless second session on day five, the feats of debutant Sam Konstas seemed like an age ago.

The 19-year-old had failed in his second Test innings, but still had the gall to chirp at his majestic opponent relentlessly. It was unbecoming, a throwback to Australian cricket pre-Cummins captaincy, and utterly compelling.

Konstas’ deadly naivety was just one of the character studies that enriched the five days. Like a glazed ham, Indian captain Rohit Sharma withered in the hours following Christmas, a legend surely now on the way out. The impetuous Kohli fighting Father Time who has set up camp outside his off stump.

And the freshness of Jaiswal and his rags-to-runs story. Or Nitish Kumar Reddy and his father, who bowed at the feet of Sunil Gavaskar, a meeting with Indian royalty only made possible by his son’s first Test century.

The intimacy was matched by drama on the final day. Of Jaiswal’s silent thumb, of Nathan Lyon wheeling away then changing his mind, of Boland – always Scotty Boland. And never far away was Cummins, catalyst and conductor in a match that secures his legacy.

The days quicken with AI daemons, pinging notifications and low-earth orbit satellites. The slow-moving humanity of this Test was like the glass of water you didn’t know you need. Over the holidays the aunts and uncles come and go, but Steve Smith is forever. And the best thing about it all? There’s one more Test to come.