It looked the same, but felt different. Same ground, same podium and some of the same people, but four years on there was quite a different feeling to the celebrations of 2009. There was, a colleague said in the press box, a lot of joy but an absence of ecstasy. It was a good way of putting it and it felt better somehow.

Maybe it was something to do with the times in which we live. Four years ago we were living in the middle of a debt-fuelled orgy of consumerism, the kind of age in which an open-top bus parade and drink-fuelled party at Trafalgar Square were fitting conclusions to a wonderfully topsy-turvy series. Now we are a little wiser, a little more sober. Credit-crunched, a lap of honour will have to do.

Some of it is down to the destination of the urn itself. In 2005, England had not held the Ashes for 16 years and the competition, because of its uncompetitive nature, had almost become an irrelevance in world cricketing terms. Now we are in the middle of a period of “pass the parcel”, the trophy having changed hands on the past three occasions for only the second time in its history. There have always been periods of dominance, mostly Australian, but it is a contest again. Normal service has been resumed. Celebrations need not go overboard; there is a degree of expectation now.

Some of the players are certainly a little older and a little wiser. Four years ago, Kevin Pietersen was at the forefront of celebrations, his hair long and with a bright blond skunk line down the middle. On Sunday, he was at the Brit Oval, but his foot was in a plaster cast and his celebrations were muted because of it. He had played but not really performed or contributed. With an Achilles’ heel, literally, where he did not have one before, he is aware of his own sporting mortality now.

Andrew Flintoff is older, too, and, we trust, a little wiser. To look at his features, he did not look much different to four years before, a great ginger beard shielding his face from the sun, but on the field it was clear that an ageing cricketer was playing out his Test career for the last time. Apart from when he swooped and threw down Ricky Ponting’s stumps, he looked, suddenly, very old, limping around the outer and unable to summon up the will with the ball. Four years is a long time in sport.

In the four years between these two great Oval moments, England have not really travelled far at all. And that is now the question for Andrew Strauss and Andy Flower, the men who take most credit for this summer’s achievement: is winning the Ashes the end of something, as it was in 2005, or the beginning?

It will be interesting to see, the late Bob Woolmer noted as he prepared his Pakistan team for England’s first post-2005 Ashes series, how they cope with success. Woolmer, as a former England player who had coached South Africa, that most driven of sporting nations, knew a little of the English sporting psyche and he had his England team spot on. They did not cope with it very well.

Partly this was down to physical and mental wear and tear — cruelly, to Simon Jones, and to Marcus Trescothick, Michael Vaughan and others — but the germ of England’s faltering progress after 2005 could be found in that orgy of self-congratulation, in the MBEs handed out like confetti at a wedding party, and the commercialisation that followed. England’s players had not known success like it and they did not know how to cope.

As the man who has been at the heart of both contests, Strauss knows what it is like to win. He knows, too, a little of what it is like to win and then lose focus, and it is his job to ensure that does not happen again. A starting point is an acceptance that England are not a top-notch team. “We are playing the No 1-ranked team,” Flower intoned throughout the series. But Australia have plummeted to fourth now, a more accurate reflection of where their talents lie. England beat a mid-ranking team, as well they ought on home soil.

So, Strauss’s team are a work in progress. They have heart and spirit in abundance and an excellent leadership team, good starting points. The batting, though, is a problem. Alastair Cook has hit a glass ceiling and looks no more competent outside off stump than he did two years ago. Only one knock of significance from him in the series. He has stalled. Paul Collingwood, to whom it must be remembered the debt of Cardiff is owed, was exposed at No 4, just as his leaden-footed, bottomhanded technique was exposed after that match. Ravi Bopara, in whom so much faith has been stowed, has had to be withdrawn from the line of fire twice in two years. Pietersen may come back to full fitness; may not.

England need to work out how to balance their team post-Flintoff. Is Stuart Broad good enough to bat at No 7? More pertinently, is he good enough to bat at No 7, given the personnel at Nos 1 to 6? And can he avoid the celebrity trap now that Lily Allen and others have noticed his good looks? And what of Stephen Harmison, who nipped in with some late wickets at the Oval. Central contract or not? And who will England’s second spinner be, if Monty Panesar cannot be trusted with his place on the mother of all “Bunsen burners”?

This sounds like rather a lot of questions for a team who have just won the Ashes. But there is no better time to tinker than when you are winning. As Australia demonstrated so ably after Headingley Carnegie, “don’t change a winning team” is just about the dumbest aphorism in sport. A touch of selectorial ruthlessness — no Collingwood to South Africa this winter, perhaps? — would send the clearest possible message that this Ashes triumph is the start of something special rather than the end.