As the afternoon meandered on and the stubbornly soggy outfield of St George's Park threatened to waste another day of the second Test at Gqeberha, South Africa had good and bad fortune to ponder.
The good news was that upon the game's long-awaited resumption at 3:45pm local time, Australia would be without one member of its intimidating quartet of fast bowlers due to illness. The bad news, with no disrespect to the others, was that it wasn't Scott Boland.
Sure enough, within 10 minutes of the restart, the Victorian had struck again to remove debutant opener Marques Ackerman — Boland's third wicket in five typically compelling overs.
Worse still for the Proteas, Mitchell Starc, who'd been a little out of sorts in his brief spell on day one, was hitting his straps too. Bowling with fluency and at speeds nudging towards 150km/h, the left-armer soon struck as well thanks to a lazy waft outside off stump from Matthew Breetzke and a smart catch from Alex Carey.
At that stage, South Africa was 4-40 and staring into the abyss.
What transpired in the hour that followed was heartening for South Africa, though perhaps not enough to shift the course of this truncated contest.
The pitch — whose lack of hessian coverings during the worst of the downpours was said to be predictive of imminent mayhem — seemed to flatten out and not behave so treacherously at all.
The batting, circumspect but not unadventurous, started to look less fragile as Proteas skipper Temba Bavuma got going with South Africa's recast number six, Ryan Rickelton. And the missing bowler, Josh Hazlewood — who Cricket Australia says will return on day three — was suddenly looking like a real hole in the bowling rotation.
Indeed, a bubbly 50-run partnership later, and with stumps not far away, Bavuma could have permitted himself some satisfaction that he and Rickelton had pulled things out of the fire so calmly. He might also have felt his side's bad luck was starting to turn when a sun-blind Marnus Labuschagne put down Rickelton at leg slip.
As ever, though, Boland had other ideas. Well, one idea, to be honest: hammer away on a patch of the pitch roughly the size of a Wisden cricketers' almanac and wait for the ball to seam either way.
The burly right-armer duly took Rickelton's outside edge and Matt Renshaw, at first slip, took a catch that could be charitably described as fortunate; it looked like Carey's, but the keeper didn't move a muscle; Renshaw did, on a significant delay, grasping it in one hand when the ball was past him and then slowly mouthing some easily-made-out words of relief: "Oh. My. God."
Thus, from a relatively promising position, the Proteas finished the day 5-97 from the 43 overs that have been possible so far. Boland, with 4-31 from 14 overs, was not simply the pick of the bowlers but a one-man show who single-handedly lifted the contest out of its torpor, his every delivery imbued with potential.
Now that he is ranked in the world's top 10 Test bowlers without commanding regular selection, it is often said that Boland is unlucky. Another way of looking at it is that, at 37 — an overripe age for a fast bowler of any kind, let alone one so vigorous and impactful — he simply knows his own virtues and limitations better than he did as a younger man, and can conserve and channel his energies in ways the regulars cannot.
It is also, surely, a minor triumph of man management. That Boland and, perhaps more so, Starc continue to glide to the crease in such prolonged spells and with such devastating impact is not a matter of luck. Today, again, Starc, who is also pushing 37, was a genuine menace: a 148km/h bouncer to Bavuma was as scary as anything he bowled in his 20s.
We talk often of Starc's eye-popping strike rate of 45 — six better than Dennis Lillee and Mitchell Johnson, seven better than Glenn McGrath and Jeff Thomson, 12 better than Starc's old sparring partner Shane Warne — but it is now his longevity that is so unusual to the point of freakishness.
Playing in his 109th Test, Starc is bowling at a level that history suggests should be impossible. Jason Gillespie and Brett Lee, the express quicks of preceding decades, were done with Test cricket at 31 and 32 respectively; like Johnson, they'd strung together 70-something Tests between the inevitable injuries.
Touch wood, Starc will feasibly play 50 or 60 more Tests than that — a coda of similar length to Merv Hughes's entire Test career. The way Cricket Australia has balanced Starc's financial and physical preparation requirements for the last decade is an organisational triumph that should be studied. If only it, and Starc himself, were replicable.
As for South Africa, what they can replicate remains to be seen, but it's very unlikely, as in Durban, that promising 50-partnerships will get this one done.