Warning : Huge tangential diversion coming up.

If you’re American you may not remember much about the summer of 2005. If you’re English, you’ll have instant recall of almost every passing, nail-biting minute.

It started with triumph. An announcement that London had won the 2012 Olympic Games amazed the nation — we don’t normally win that sort of thing. Everybody was in party mood. The media was throbbing with excitement.

That euphoric moment turned to ashes the very next day. England’s long-expected 9/11 arrived at last. 7/7 saw the quadruple bombing of the London Underground, or Tube as it’s known locally, and a single bus full of people. Fifty-two people died and around 700 were maimed or injured.

To call these events a rollercoaster ride is something of an understatement. Never was the mood of one city turned on its head so swiftly. But rollercoaster was the only word to describe the rest of the summer, thanks to one astonishing, almost archetypal, sporting event. The Battle for the Ashes 2005.

The Ashes is a small urn containing the burned remains of a set of cricket bails, some say stumps, that were incinerated when Australia first beat England at the greatest game on earth back in 1888, or some such distant epoch.

Now they were up for grabs again in a tussle between the world’s best cricketers, the Aussies, who hardly ever lost, and a young England team that was fit, well-led and bursting with spirit.

The rest is sporting history, for only an Ashes test series can be called Titanic. Why? Because it lasts for 25 days spread over five, five-day matches, played out over a whole summer.

Never have fortunes swung with such scintillating rapidity. When one team gained mastery, the other fought back with such guile and determination that the very opposite occurred barely minutes later. It was breathtaking and truly heart-stopping. Many people had heart attacks that season. It was a good year for cardiac specialists.

On and on it went, tension so great that even the Queen said she couldn’t bear to watch it. And she was supposed to support each of the sides, since she’s Monarch of both.

England won in the end, but it went to the final day at The Oval Cricket Ground. Had Australia held England to a draw, they would have taken the series and the Ashes, but it was Kevin Pietersen’s flashing blade that carried the day for England in true spectacular, Nelsonian fashion.

England had just committed itself to maybe £20 billion ($38 billion) to host a dreary set of amateur sporting events spread over three weeks seven years away. Yet it had just hosted the finest sporting summer ever witnessed by mere mortals, and it cost nothing.

I won’t describe it again, for you can read it here on Syntagma — the Blog of Record.

Now the return series is about to take place in Australia over a longer and much-hotter down-under summer. The Aussies have won nine of their last ten test matches and seem poised to regain those precious Ashes. England have had mixed fortunes, and lots of injuries, including to their inspirational skipper, Michael Vaughan and the irrepressible Freddy Flintoff, the new captain.

Will it be as great a series as 2005? Will it be as close? Who will win?

I can only quote the fallen American Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, in one of his more pithy moments :

There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know.

He means, stuff happens.