Kyle Jamieson could only laugh. After a painstaking 847-day absence, gradually rebuilding his body after a serious back injury, Jamieson was back in Test whites at Lord's, with the new ball in hand and England debutant Emilio Gay in his sights. He bounded in from the Nursery End and let fly, only to watch his knee-high full toss disappear to the cover-point boundary.
Yet six hours and 15 minutes later, Jamieson was leading his team-mates off the field after they had bowled England out for just 140. He put his left hand over the New Zealand crest on his jumper and waved to the crowd with his right, lodging the ball between his middle and ring fingers as he acknowledged the applause for his sixth five-wicket haul, and his first in nearly five years.
It was a triumphant return from an injury that left Jamieson "at the bottom of the cliff" and even his surgeons bemused. He suffered a recurrence of a lower-back stress fracture a year after undergoing surgery, with the fracture reopening at one of the screws that had been inserted into his vertebrae. He spent 10 months sidelined and feared for his career.
Jamieson sought help from outside cricket and "outsourced" his rehabilitation to high-performance consultants Chelsea Lane and Matt Dallow, working with both to this day. Lane's experience includes working with Steph Curry and the Golden State Warriors in the NBA, while Dallow, her husband, has competed at the Winter Olympics for New Zealand in the bobsled and has since become a respected coach.
"Certainly in the early points of the journey, for sure," Jamieson said, when asked if he had ever doubted if he would return to Test cricket.
"When you work your butt off and it happens again, you're staring down the barrel of, like, 'What would I do different?' But through the process of outsourcing my rehab, uncovering what went wrong, it gave me a lot of confidence that it wasn't really me that was the issue with why I was missing time out of the game.
"There was a whole bunch of reasons why [the injury] occurred, and if I fixed that, I was reasonably confident that I'd at least be able to play some form of cricket. And then as you keep going and you get a few reps under your belt, the red-ball Everest, in terms of the physical nature of it, was very much a possibility."
Jamieson has steadily built up to this comeback over the past 18 months. He has played a single first-class match for Canterbury in that time, but gradually worked his way back into competitive cricket firstly through T20s, then 50-over cricket, and played 29 limited-overs internationals in the gap between his 19th and 20th Tests.
He took a bag of red balls with him to the IPL and bowled extra overs at the end of Delhi Capitals' training sessions to prepare his body for this series. New Zealand's management also opted to leave him out of their Test against Ireland last week - along with Matt Henry and Will O'Rourke - so that he could get to London ahead of time and bowl in the Lord's nets.
It is easy to see Jamieson's success after building up his workload in India and question why Jofra Archer could not have done the same, but the two situations are different. Jamieson only played twice for Delhi, whose play-off hopes had effectively ended by mid-May; by contrast, Archer was ever-present for Rajasthan Royals, and led their attack into the play-offs.
"I claimed to the boys at the back end that I was the best net bowler in the IPL, with how many overs I bowled," Jamieson joked. "It was really lucky. Delhi were really good. I was able to go to other grounds and bowl overs in the morning, have a break, do some S&C [strength and conditioning], come back, bowl in the evening.
"I was reasonably far away from playing, so I didn't have to worry about preparing for games as such, and could use every training opportunity we had to get [my workloads] up. It certainly felt a little bit easier today bowling in those conditions than running in trying to bowl 15 sets in 45 degrees, so [I'm] thankful for that."
Jamieson deserves immense credit for preparing his body for the workload of Test cricket but it is rarely as simple as it sounds. That much is obvious from Matt Henry's situation: he had not played for Chennai Super Kings since early April, but arrived in the UK with a low-grade hamstring strain and managed only four overs on Thursday before going off with back spasms.
In fact, Henry's injury made Jamieson's efforts even more admirable, rotating with O'Rourke and Nathan Smith in a three-man pace attack which necessitated multiple changes of ends. He took wickets from both on a lively surface, as a combination of seam movement and variable bounce made him awkward to play - or to leave, as Jamie Smith discovered when losing his off stump.
He dismissed Gay with a near-perfect ball that angled in from around the wicket, then kissed the outside edge on its way to Daryl Mitchell at slip, and his figures might have been even better than 5 for 62 had Rachin Ravindra not dropped a regulation catch at deep square leg when Harry Brook misplaced a pull shot.
There was a short window in 2021-22 when Jamieson mixed it with the very best bowlers in the world. He has never been genuinely fast - his average speed at Lord's was a shade below 82mph/132kph - but his 6ft 8in frame and ability to move the ball both in the air and off the pitch marked him out as a man with a rare skillset; at the start of his international career, he was briefly unplayable.
He was not at his absolute best at Lord's, and his pace was down in his third and fourth spells. But after he had Ollie Robinson caught behind - thanks to a speculative review from Tom Latham at slip - to secure a five-wicket haul, he extended his remarkable record: midway through his 20th Test, he has taken 85 wickets at an average of just 19.30.
Jamieson did not have long to put his feet up: he had to cut his ice bath short when Robinson took three wickets in four balls, and his first task on Friday will be to help New Zealand scrap up towards first-innings parity. He faces the prospect of another heavy workload with the ball thereafter but it is one he will relish. "It's been a long journey to get to this point," he said.