We've waited and waited for the day of the first night Test match, and now we wait on the day for it to begin. It won't be until mid-afternoon when the sun already will have begun to descend behind the Sir Donald Bradman Pavilion, and then we'll have to wait a few more hours until dusk for it to look and feel like night-time sport. Waiting is very much the business of Test cricket, but usually it is waiting during games, not for them.

The suspense is not killing, exactly, but it is a bit like anticipating the day of, say, a job interview or an exam result, and then the separate exercise of waiting on the day for the hour. Australia and New Zealand, meantime, will be trying to play a Test match, noting the historic dimension of the moment while trying to close their minds to it. You don't want to be day-night dreaming when David Warner is lashing a pink ball somewhere in your vicinity.

Routines matter in cricket more than other sport, for players and fans. For a game played over so many hours and days, a casual approach won't do. There has to be a plan. This applies from day-to-day and year-to-year. It especially applies in Adelaide, where the annual Test match is not just a date on the calendar, but etched into it. It is the most social Test match of all. Nowhere else in Australia still does Test match dinners on the scale of the SACA members show on Wednesday night.

The day-night initiative has been taken to engage fans, but it is fans as much as players who stand to be dislocated by it. Suddenly, it's not lunch and tea, but tea and dinner. Tea is still 20 minutes, but comes first. Dinner is 40 minutes.

This will become the crucial juncture of the day, on and off the field. The experience of nine trial pink-ball matches in the Sheffield Shield teaches that nothing much untoward happens until the sun begins to sink, in the interregnum between day and floodlight, when the ball is likely to grow frisky and when it is momentarily harder for batsmen and fieldsman to see it. This will be in the thinking of both teams, and their strategies. Australian captain Steve Smith affects nonchalance about the unknowns in day-night Test cricket, as if to to say the sun will still come up, but it is what happens as it starts to go down that will be telling.

That's one side of the fence. On the other, it is the time when fans normally would be merrily de-camping into the Adelaide night. This year, who knows? Anecdotally, restaurants and pubs are taking fewer bookings. But also anecdotally, other fans are planning to abandon the Test at that point anyway. In truth, abandoning the stands for the hospitality tents in the last session is a bit of an Adelaide tradition. Cricket Australia will pray that the expected full house does not half-empty at dinner, for the Big Bash League suggests that fully subscribed night cricket at the Adelaide Oval will be every bit as electric a spectacle as night footy.

CA is acutely aware of these swings and roundabouts, but has its eye on the bigger picture, on the smaller screen, prime time Test cricket. Adelaide is the natural crucible. The Sydney and Melbourne Tests are too big to change, Perth is too many time zones away and Hobart is not on the radar. Only Brisbane, now with deluxe floodlights, could compete, and yet might. Right now, it feels as if cricket is putting its foot in the day-night Test water, but in truth, it is probable that CA already has crossed a Rubicon by scheduling it. Night footy was a wondrous thing when it was first tried, but quickly became the game's big stage.

Seemingly incidental in the build-up to this Test, but crucial once the first pink ball is bowled, is the opposition and the stake. Australia cannot lose this series to New Zealand, but have not yet won it and won't go in here thinking merely to save it.

The least that can be predicted is that it won't be easy for batsmen, which is cause for rejoicing after two Tests in which batting was easy. Test aficionados tend to panic too quickly about wobbles in the organic balance between bat and ball. In England this year, batting was said to be too hard, and in India right now just about impossible, None the less, the incidence of vast-scoring draws has increased alarmingly in Australia in recent seasons, so if pink-ball cricket introduces a random element, so much the better, as long as the dignity of the game is not lost.

At lights out on Friday night, we will all be a little wiser. On Saturday morning, the waiting and twiddling of fingers and avoiding of chores will resume.