What transpired over the last five days at Dubai International Stadium once again confirms the widely-held belief that Pakistan remain the most unpredictable cricket team in the world.
Going into the two-match Test series, their form was such that it would have been deemed a miracle if they lasted four days, never mind winning a match.
Their batsmen were struggling to remain on the crease, the fielding was suspect, and their usually reliable bowling attack looked fragile in the absence of many trusted and frontline names.
And yet, apart from the first 15 minutes of the match when Mitchell Johnson and Peter Siddle reduced them to 7-2 in 3.1 overs, Misbah-ul Haq and his men dominated Australia completely and dashed their hopes of becoming the No1 ranked Test nation by winning this series 2-0.
There were two perceptible changes in Pakistan as they moved from the limited-over formats to the Test match, which helped them turn around their fortunes.
Even though it was a superb team effort, and spinners Zulfiqar Babar and Yasir Shah definitely need to be applauded, it was the arrival of Younis Khan and the way Pakistani batsmen batted against the Australian spinners that made all the difference.
Khan walked in to bat with the team in crisis, having lost the two quick wickets on the opening day. If ever Pakistan required something extraordinary from its most down-to-earth superstar, this was the moment.
And the 36 year old Khan did not disappoint – neither in the first innings, nor in the second – as he scored two crucial centuries en route to a host of new batting records for Pakistan.
As unorthodox as his methods may look, Khan is one batsman who puts a huge premium on his wicket.
The fact that he has got 26 career hundreds against 28 half centuries, shows how much of an effort he puts in to convert those hard-earned 50s into 100s.
What also helps is Khan does not suffer from a particular syndrome that afflicts many other superstars. He is not an imposing personality and gets along very well with the youngsters in the team.
The newcomers are in awe of Khan’s record, but he also genuin-ely makes an effort to reach out to them, guide them and make things as easy as possible as they settle down in international cricket.
The other noticeable change in the Pakistan team was that they never let Australian spinners Nathan Lyon and Steve O’Keefe dominate the proceedings.
Khan, Asad Shafiq and Sarfraz Ahmed repeatedly swept the spinners and stepped out and upset their rhythms in the first innings, while Ahmed Shehzad did the same in the second.
The two Aussie spinners may not be in the class of Shane Warne, but they came in with a lot more combined experience (33 Tests) than Babar and debutant Shah (two Tests), and were expected to have a better impact.
What Pakistan have to show now is some kind of consistency as they begin their second Test match in a couple of days.
But history has proven that consistency is something that you should not expect from this side. It will be interesting to see which Pakistan team turns up at Abu Dhabi, and how much more they can surprise us.
