I watched these Ashes, from New York, on legally dubious links provided by a website called totalsportsmadness.com. Sometimes you got the Sky Sports coverage – Bumble, Beefy, Nasser, Athers: a poem by Ogden Nash – other times you ended up with Australia's Channel Nine coverage and its nicknameless greats – Mark Taylor, Michael Slater, Bill Lawry. Only Warney featured in both broadcasts, spinning both ways, of course.

From time to time the live stream would suffer an abrupt death, shut down by some intellectual property killjoy to whom total sports madness means nothing. But invariably an alternative pop-up worked satisfactorily, more or less, even if it was interrupted between overs by Indian ads for body sprays that drive women wild and/or cut out sweating, even if you play rugby.

It would seem a solitary business, following the Ashes in America, online. But you also have Cricinfo's live scorecard on, and the Guardian's over-by-over, and it's clear from the emails they receive, and from the fervent, fastidious comments appended to the newspaper blogs, that countless men around the world are in an electronic boat very similar to my own.

For the fan of the English cricket team – who need not be English, I can attest – the bliss of these Ashes has been without precedent, even those of us who remember Gatting's victorious tourists. For such a fan, traumatised by a quarter-century of drubbings and humiliations, the spectacle of national excellence by proxy has been nothing less than therapeutic.

And nothing was more moving than the sight of Gower and Botham and Lloyd succumbing, in the aftermath of the Sydney win, to a daze of unprofessional happiness.

For all I know, these men are sick to death of one another and will lose their minds if they see one more ball pragmatically pushed through midwicket by Alastair Cook. But I doubt it, not least because these Ashes have offered a new experience, and new experiences are interesting. It is interesting, for example, to think about how the Australians must be feeling. Not good, I'll bet. They have our sympathy, even our empathy.

If there was a body spray that would make them feel better, that would spare them the despair and ignominy, I'm sure we would hand it over. We have no use for it now.

Joseph O'Neill is the author of Netherland, considered by many to be one of the best novels ever written about cricket