AND so the countenance divine did, indeed, shine forth upon the clouded Oval, as the cheerful yeomen of Kennington reminded us with a number of renditions. But that the owner of this divine countenance should turn out to be Kevin Pietersen — this was not to be expected.

You go into the fifth and final Test of this Ashes series with poor recent form, you do not expect to be its hero. Unless you are Pietersen, that is, who bears the demeanour of one who believes that every day will be an heroic one each morning he skips gaily out of bed. Talk about timing.

Pietersen might have thought that the blond streak in his hair was an attention-grabber. Indeed, when he doffed his helmet and saluted the crowd to mark his century, there was every indication that he had had the headlight highlighted again. But when his feet touch the ground again, if he has not already soared too close to the sun, he may elect to save on the peroxide in the future and plump for scoring historic Test centuries instead.

Cometh the hour and all that . . . Pietersen bestrode this magnificent stage like a colossus, albeit a lucky colossus who offers regular chances and could have been back in the pavilion before he had got off the mark. He was dropped on 0, 15 and 60, he slashed and missed repeatedly in his early confrontations with Shane Warne and lived through a brutal spell from Brett Lee before lunch when he was so overwhelmed that it seemed he could be extinguished on the spot.

Some players may find such an experience destructively rattling to their self-confidence. Especially when they have not scored any decent runs for a month. Instead, Pietersen went in for lunch and when he came out, he proceeded to hit 41 runs off 15 balls.

And it was not as if yesterday’s was any old humdrum game of cricket. OK, so he — and England — had good fortune. But events on the final day of the fifth Test also told us a bit about the making of a hero. When sport and drama can reach no higher plane and spectators are watching through the gaps between their fingers, even the greatest athletes can have performance strangled from within them. Pietersen’ s colleagues from higher up the order yesterday bore witness to that.

Those who survive, we tend to associate with steely mentality: Jonny Wilkinson, Nick Faldo, Bjorn Borg. But to come equipped with soaring self-belief clearly helps, too. Arguably, Pietersen had no right to be “the man who did it”, but when your mentality is as cocksure as his is, who is there to stop you?

Warne might have been the answer. Which brings us to the pivotal moment yesterday that may have decided the outcome of the Ashes series. It was at 11.50am: Pietersen on 15, Australia on a roll, England quaking, wickets falling, disaster looming and Pietersen dropped by Warne at first slip off Lee. What is more, it was a dolly. Warne hardly had to move.

Thus the cruel irony of this magnificent Test series: that Warne may have utterly imposed his personality on the entire contest, he may have taken an extraordinary 40 wickets, but he still fluffed the sitter that effectively decided the series.

That, at least, was the opinion of the crowd. As the shadows lengthened and it became clear that Pietersen’s innings had done the trick, nervousness gave way to conviviality and the crowd at the Vauxhall End next to the boundary where he was fielding broke into a chant of “Warney dropped the Ashes”.

This was ribbing of the warmest kind, for they followed it with another chant of “We only wish you were English” and the moment bore witness to the generous emotions this series has produced. There was Pietersen doing his superman thing, winning the Ashes and thrashing a 94.7mph Lee ball for six, and the crowd were serenading Warne.

Pietersen would take the attack to Warne, too. He registered his 150 with consecutive boundaries and that pretty much accounted for Warne’s withdrawal from the Australia attack. Not that the sense of occasion was lost on Warne either. When Pietersen did lose his wicket, bowled by Glenn McGrath for 158, Warne ran from his spot in the field, not to congratulate the bowler, as is traditional, but to congratulate the match-winner. “Shane said to me, ‘Make sure you savour the moment,’ ” Pietersen said. “He told me, ‘It’s a special, special moment.’ ”

He talked afterwards of his duel with Lee before lunch, when the Australia pace bowler was at his most ferocious. “I knew it was him or me,” Pietersen said. “I thought the positive way was the way forward.” And he mentioned, too, that this positive approach had rubbed off on some of his team-mates. “There have been one or two questions: where do you get it? How do you do it?” he said.

His team-mates praised his man-of-the-match performance. “One of the best knocks I’ve seen in my life,” was the assessment of Andrew Strauss.

Andrew Flintoff said: “He epitomised what this side is about. When something needs to be done, someone will do it. We witnessed one of the great innings today.”

Warne, too, acclaimed “the X-factor” that comes with his Hampshire team-mate. He had said before the series started that Pietersen has the sort of game that could turn the Ashes and on the day that he bowed out of Test cricket in England, he was proved right.

There has been much said and written throughout this series about generations ending and power shifting and here, on the last day of the series, we saw it all. In his power play yesterday, Pietersen broke two bats and an entire nation’s hearts. Like Warne, he wears diamond earrings, but only his, it would appear, will be glinting for many years to come.