The prime minister is making stuff up about pork pies and the president of the United States wants to nuke hurricanes, but amid the late summer madness, we – we the people – have Ben Stokes. On a blazing bank holiday weekend for the ages, the hero of Headingley near single-handedly (for we must not forget the bespectacled, brilliant Jack Leach) provided a moment of respite from the catastrophic chaos the powers that be seem all too happy to unleash upon their citizenry.

Just to be clear, here is what the immigrant Ben Stokes is not: he is not a distillation of the “Dunkirk spirit”, to be co-opted by nostalgic disaster merchants keen to claim credit for all that is good and wander back off to the champagne tent to inspect their portfolios when it goes tits up. He is, rather, an elite sportsman – an expert, if you will – who spectacularly adapted his play to navigate a way through the trickiest of situations. Unlike those in potentially analogous circumstances, Stokes had the time he needed: but what he still had to find were skill, nerve and, perhaps most importantly, respect for the game he was playing and the opponents he faced. There’s a lesson there. And after a period of calculated defensiveness, he got busy.

Play Video 2:19 Ashes: Ben Stokes on England's sensational third Test win over Australia – video

For those watching in the ground and on screens everywhere, it was a masterclass in digging in and knowing when to deploy the flair, the risky reverse sweep that nets a six, the cheeky cut. There was luck as well, of course, and that special growing sense that the day was a day for an extravaganza.

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Above all it was a huge cheer-up, a shot in the arm in the midst of national dejection and disarray. With the summer nearly over and the prospect of Halloween bringing not merely the usual collection of ghouls and sugar-crazed chancers, but a seismic shift in the country’s global fortunes, we should allow ourselves, just for a day, to indulge in a bit of patriotic delight. Within the boundaries of decorum, naturally.

The point about sport is that it happens over and over again, which is both terrible – can’t we just freeze-frame Stokes’s final air punch and forget the rest? – and brilliant, because redemption is always possible as long as the ball’s in play.

We lose ourselves in it because it’s not, contrary to Bill Shankly’s famous dictum, even more important than life and death itself. Rather, it is a temporary cessation of the world’s hostilities, an opportunity for a collective shrugging off of responsibility and burden. The losses and the humiliations are terrible, but they are not insurmountable. The victories, though: well, when they’re as sweet as this one, they deserve to be savoured for as long as possible. The Old Trafford Test is not, sadly, far away, and of course we may all be weeping into our beer within a fortnight. But not today.

• Alex Clark writes for the Guardian and the Observer