For punters, Twenty20 has been a blast: a starburst of sixes, a welter of wickets and, not least, a farcical "bowl-out" during the finalists' first meeting where trembling players proved embarrassingly incapable of hitting a set of stumps.
Indeed, embarrassment is the essence of Twenty20. Players don't just fail, they are humiliated.
A promising young bowler, Stuart Broad, was smashed for six sixes in an over. A brilliant young batsman, Michael Clarke, faced only four balls during the entire tournament. Sri Lanka's able and stylish top order, which excelled in the World Cup and whose variety of strokeplayers is one of the pleasures of the modern game, committed batting harakiri in 10 overs. The fielding has been surprisingly ham-handed, with plenty of catches missed and only three taken in the slips in the 26 games preceding the final. Twenty20, then, turns a game of subtleties, intricacies and distant intimacies into a theatre of cruelty for television.
Cricket lovers underestimate this philosophical shift at their peril. Cricket has traditionally been a game for players, with everyone enjoying the scope and the time to show their own special skills. But this length, breadth and variety have made the game difficult to mass market.
When one-day cricket brought the spectators' understandable desire to see a result in a day into calculations, that balance was disturbed. "In cricket, the players are the boss," observed Peter Roebuck. "In one-day cricket, the game is the boss."
In Twenty20, that boss totes an MBA and a BlackBerry, and his concern is chiefly ratings rather than runs or wickets. Indeed, the format originated on the marketing whiteboards at the England and Wales Cricket Board four years ago as a means of attracting cricket "tolerators": sports watchers averse to the game who might consider going if it was shorter, sharper and noisier.
A novel idea, this: to redesign a game to the specifications of those who don't like it, rather like creating art for consumers who prefer pornography or composing music for listeners with a taste for cacophony.
But the practitioners' acquiescence is bought by an arrangement reminiscent of Alfred Hitchcock's principle for dealing with actors: "Pay them heaps and treat them like cattle."
So the administrators have a hit on their hands, a hit that will reverberate. We have already seen the best-case scenario: a successful tournament still tinged with novelty.
Through time, however, it is likely that the main beneficiaries will be commercial intermediaries.
Cricket will make a great deal of money in the short term, money it has no obvious need for and will mostly waste, and it will be left a coarser, crueller, crasser game as a result. Now that the Twenty20 world championship is over, another proverb comes to mind: be careful what you wish for.
A downbeat note, this, to end an upbeat round-up, but what the hell - it's a rare moment of triumph undiluted by background controversies, and it is ours to enjoy. Soon enough, the circus will start again - with Australia for opposition, and the new captain facing, for the first time, the pressure of playing at home, with a team studded, or is it littered, with three former captains. Till then - cheers.
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