By shifting from active cessation mode to maintenance mode, which requires less daily effort but a specific kind of ongoing awareness about the dormant circuits that one year did not fully extinguish.

Specific, identifiable cues that were never extinguished during cessation, not because the quit attempt failed broadly, but because these particular triggers were never encountered after quitting.

By understanding that the smell is a cue and that your response to it will change predictably over time, from craving trigger to neutral sensation to occasional mild aversion.

Yes, and what you are experiencing at five years is almost certainly not a craving. It is a memory, an identity echo, or a dormant circuit briefly reactivated by a rare cue. These are different things with different meanings.

By preparing for the event as a high-risk cue environment before you arrive because the event itself, once you're inside it, is one of the worst places to make decisions about smoking.

Mostly nothing dramatic because at long-term cessation, the craving is mild enough and brief enough that the response is almost automatic rather than effortful.