Notwithstanding events at Leeds on Monday the Australian backpackers in carriage D of the 8.05 to King's Cross that evening were still in high spirits. The conductor tried to gloat a little: "What was the score at Headingley today, boys?" The retort was a chorus: "3-1!"
When your team already have the figurative Ashes in their metaphorical knapsack, you can afford to brazen out the odd defeat. And the response in Australia to Mark the Butcher, to judge from its newspapers, has been philosophical - or as philosophical as Australians become.
Most reports gushed with praise for Butcher, invoking the coincidence that his 173 not out was an echo of Bradman's 1948 score in the Australian version of the Headingley miracle. Brisbane's Courier-Mail even thought the innings "Bradman-like"; compliments do not come much higher in a country where Bradman-ness is next to godliness.
As for Adam Gilchrist, a straw poll of past captains in the Australian found them behind his Sunday-night declaration to a man, with Bill Brown in the role of elder statesman: cricket had "benefited tremendously from the outcome of the match", thanks to a declaration that "nine out of 10 captains would have made". And the 10th captain was probably a pom anyway.
The official Australian Cricket Board website baggygreen.com posted an impassioned, if not empurpled, defence of Gilchrist's initiative: "Had he been a more frugal captain, an inflexible man, or a character imbued with a meanness of spirit, Gilchrist could have chosen to kill England's chances of victory in this Test. At a number of junctures. Instead he risked a real possibility of defeat in the pursuit of a glorious win." This, at any rate, is the house position.
The support has been so uniform and pre-emptive that one wonders whether they protest too much. Make no mistake, Australians do not like losing Tests, even dead ones and even after so much success. When Steve Waugh's men lost that unforgettable series in India a few months ago the comments that "yes, well, perhaps it was good for cricket" emerged only through gritted teeth.
It was to those matches in India that an Australian observer's mind turned on Monday. Australia's cycle of supremacy in recent times has followed a fairly simple formula, based on their bowlers generating regular wicket opportunities and complemented by acrobatic catching in attacking field placings. It has been so successful as a Plan A that there has been little need for a Plan B; on the rare occasions the Australians have been pressed, someone has usually made up the leeway.
Headingley repeated the Australians' experience in Calcutta, where they had no fall-back position once their initial thrust had faltered. Like Waugh there, when he set his bowlers the challenge of at least two consecutive days in enervating conditions by enforcing the follow-on, Gilchrist set his bowlers the challenge of bowling to fields where aggression brings instant gratification.
In the end the leading indicators of England's opportunity were probably Shane Warne's career at Headingley, two wickets in two prior Tests, and Jason Gillespie's career in Tests, 25 spaced over 4 years. Headingley was Gillespie's 12th successive baggy green game - the longest run of his career - and he looked like a workhorse who has been a little too willing for his own welfare.
Australians, though, are not a churlish people. Less formal as a sample of antipodean opinion than the foregoing, though probably as scientific, was yesterday's email inbox. The 25 addressors were all delighted by Butcher's innings.
A club mate who has ribbed me for years about smoking and drinking coffee through lunch breaks wrote to apologise: "I now understand this to be the breakfast of champions." There was also an English friend who for the past few months has been crimson with rage at Butcher's continued selection. "Of course," he said, "I've always rated Butcher."