If you’re Sam Konstas, you’re used to things moving quickly. It took 718 first-class runs to get into the Australian team. It took 113 Test runs to potentially change the way it is set up. For almost two years since Travis Head won a shootout in India, the plan has been clear: on the next ragging Asian pitch, the usual No 5 would skip up the order, opening the batting to target rare overs of seam or to smack spinners using a harder ball. Usman Khawaja would partner him with graft, the veteran regular opener bridging the gap after David Warner’s retirement.

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A few weeks before Australia’s imminent series in Sri Lanka, though, that plan was turned upside down. Konstas is also an opener. Konstas is also in the squad. On the momentum of the moment, Konstas is going to play. So either Khawaja moves down the order for the first time in years, Konstas plays out of position in his third Test, or Australia abandon the Head plan that has sat there for so long waiting to be implemented. However it goes will mean a major last-minute change on the basis of a Test career that reads 60, 8, 23, 22.

The numbers tell you how much this moment in Australian cricket is about vibes. There is such excitement about Konstas, buzz created by the appearance of a 19-year-old for whom reality has not yet clouded potential. People are switching on to see him make 9 from 14 balls in the Big Bash. People are getting shirts with his face on them. A guy chasing him for a photo jumped out of a car without applying the handbrake so that it rolled downhill into a collision.

The excitement is based on the 60, not on the 8, the 23, or the 22. It’s based on the manner and the moment of Konstas’s debut innings, scooping his way into the national consciousness. There are a couple of parts at play here. One, some England enthusiasts have a point when asking why Australian media and spectators responded as though this was unprecedented. Making 60 from 65? Not even that fast. T20 shots over slip? England have batted like that for years.

England have, and have been scorned by Australians for it on the basis of being egotists. Before England, Rishabh Pant did it. Before Pant, Brendon McCullum did, scoop-less but batting with the same aggression that he coaches now. Back goes the line, through Virender Sehwag, Adam Gilchrist, Sanath Jayasuriya, all the way to Charlie Macartney and Gilbert Jessop. Yet local media wrote up Boxing Day as a red-ball revolution, a rewriting of how cricket is played, a hundred other pieces of hyperbole.

The second part of the equation, though, is the context of the act. It wasn’t just the shots Konstas played, it was such an innings at such an age. Doing it on debut. Doing it on Boxing Day morning, in the seventh over, at the primest of prime times, with a country watching from the couch. Doing it to the best bowler in the world, and in the series, while to that point Jasprit Bumrah had repeatedly torn Australia’s top order apart.

There was the fact that it was a tactical choice, taking on the hardest task with the coolest method, like stopping a runaway train after backflipping on to it with a dirt bike. Two overs of playing and missing before the first reverse ramp. Failed twice, got the third, kept going. He faced 33 of Bumrah’s 36-ball spell, it cost 38 runs, and a 180-degree turn began the march to Australia’s win.

Tactical surprise though only works once. Second innings? Bumrah jagged one a mile, restoring the natural order in a clatter of stumps. So to the question that still hangs overhead: what should Konstas do next? He hatched his plan for one bowler, but continued it in Sydney after Bumrah was injured. In the second innings he played like a pinch-hitter. The ball of his dismissal could have been hit through the off side, but he tried a flat-bat over mid on.

Attack doesn’t have to mean the lowest percentage option. This is the trap that Konstas has set for himself: adrenaline and validation made him want to continue what sustainability argued against.

This may all sound dour, but it’s not to deny the enjoyment of Boxing Day, the spectacle and the substance. The thing is, people loved the innocence of his approach, the joie de vivre. Risk and reward. The lack of thinking, or of having to think. And that only charms as long as it works. It can’t work for long. The impulse to protect that innocence stems from the inevitability that you can’t. Entering Test cricket is stepping into the spotlight. Face your first ball and be assessed by millions, the eyes watching from the stands and at the other end of the broadcast waves. As per physics, systems are influenced by observation. That has already begun.

In a way, Konstas now has bigger challenges than a debut with nothing to lose. Two Tests in Galle having never faced a ball in Asia. A World Test Championship tilt in England against South Africa’s new-ball might. One chance at a title, in which an opener smacking 20 will not be good enough. Another switch to the slow tracks of the Caribbean. And if he comes through those tasks with confidence bolstered rather than depleted, the fever season of a home Ashes.

At this stage, nobody knows whether he’s up to it. For all the talk of twin tons for New South Wales, they’re the only hundreds of his first-class career. He might be the prodigy who makes it, he might be a kid who slogged and got away with it. Australia’s selectors tried a hunch that worked so well they’re wedded to it, up to the doorstep of the next southern summer. It might prove a stroke of fortune, it might prove a backfire. The one certainty is that when Konstas reaches the middle in Sri Lanka next week, people will turn to the screen.