A proper five-match series with all variants of spin bowling on display and though India were in control throughout, the sport was just about competitive enough to make it absorbing. Heaven.

Particularly heartening after an autumn trip to Sportel Monaco, where all logic seemed to be pointing towards the steady demise of long-form sport, has been the attitude of Virat Kohli, the Indian captain.

Here, patently, in the land of the moneybags Indian Premier League (IPL), was a man to whom the extreme, five-day, 30-hour, draw-is-possible format still mattered with an intensity you could feel 5,000 miles away.

A batsman who now averages better than 50 internationally in all forms of the game, Kohli would be a strong contender for my athlete of 2016.

But Kohli has been far from alone in his capacity to enthral and amaze sporting audiences in a world that has grown disconcerting and scary in so many other respects.

At a moment in time when so much of the established order looks to be teetering on the brink, threatening to expose us to a terrifyingly unpredictable future, sport has continued in 2016 to soothe our anxieties, to reassure and distract us with its genius for scattering magic dust, for manufacturing narrative as spellbinding as a Chaucer, a Disney or an Angela Carter.

In a world set on an increasingly divisive course, sport is one of a diminishing pool of things we can still rely on.

I can seldom recall feeling as grateful for its redemptive power as at this year-end.

Two lists of those who have added more than their tuppence worth to the sum of human happiness in 2016 should suffice to underline the point.

One list is of teams: the Chicago Cubs, Leicester City, Fiji (rugby sevens), Iceland (football), Wales (also football) and England (women’s hockey).

One of individuals: Kohli, Nicola Adams, Sophie Christiansen, Andy Murray, Elaine Thompson, Simone Biles, Katinka Hosszú, (a little grudgingly) Cristiano Ronaldo and, if I may be permitted a second cricketer in what, after all, is a highly personal selection, Carlos Brathwaite.

You can even throw in the incomparable Valegro in a horse-list all his own.

This was also the year when, in my mid-50s, I returned to regular, or at least semi-regular, recreational sport after a 15-year gap.

As with places or people you see again after a long interval, the resumption brought a sense of perspective.

There are two lightning bolts of illumination from this personal comeback that are perhaps worth sharing.

1. I don’t think I ever appreciated with such clarity the rather obvious point that spectating is rendered far more rewarding if it is anchored in personal experience.

How can you really understand the brilliance of a Teddy Riner or a Val Adams if you have never tried judo or shot-putting even just once?

It is, as I say, a fairly obvious point.

But, in an age in which; a) relatively benign patriotism, in sport and beyond, is displaying an increasing tendency to morph into malignant nationalism and b) for all sorts of reasons, kids are being enticed away from the muddy playing-fields of my youth into make-believe scenarios where they may imagine they are competing or otherwise interacting with galácticos via some networked device or virtual reality headset, I doubt the point has ever been more worth making.

2. The other truth about recreational sport that returning to it has brought home to me is the following:

However heated things get on the field of play, however different you might think you are from your opponent(s), your very presence in that field/court/pool to take part in a frequently bizarre, essentially meaningless ritual for no monetary reward amounts to a cast-iron guarantee that you have much more in common with your adversaries of the moment than there are differences between you.

As we approach the end of this deeply unsettling year – for the world and, let’s face it, in spite of the high points, for sport – that doesn’t seem like a bad thought to leave you with.