This is not difficult to do if you understand that properties are different from attributes. Attributes (as a rule) do not change, but properties do. The selected attribute will always remain the same as in the original HTML, and the selected property will depend on what happened to the element in the page resource.
So, you can select the original selected item based on its selected attribute, and then set its selected property.
document.querySelector('option[selected]').selected = true;
jsFiddle demonstrating this.
Please note that this requires a browser that supports querySelector . These are most of them these days, but some older browsers will not. If this is a problem, you will need to find the element using hasAttribute('selected') .
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