When did it start getting weird for you? Perhaps it was when friends and family members who had previously shown not the slightest flicker of interest in cricket started texting to ask what a Super Over was. Perhaps it was seeing England on the victory podium and realising that the phrase ‘Liam Dawson, World Cup winner’ was not the product of a parlour game or a vivid cheese dream, but cold, insoluble reality.

For me, it was switching on the television the following morning to find that in a curious coup, virtually the entire British media had been taken over by stalwart England cricketers from the mid-2000s. Ashley Giles on the Today programme. Monty Panesar on Good Morning Britain. Ian Bell on Victoria Derbyshire. Alex Wharf entering the Love Island villa and making the ladies weak at the knees with his tales of the 2004 Champions Trophy final. Remarkably, only one of those is made up.

Football squandered its 1966 legacy: the team stagnated, the stadiums got older and more decrepit, the players themselves were shamefully neglected.

And yet, I defy any cricket fan to gaze upon the scenes from Trafalgar Square and not feel vaguely moved. Clearly there’s a germ of something there: some rumbling of an ancient memory that might simply have been dormant rather than extinct. Perhaps there was a little more love out there for this silly little game than we imagined. A cynic might point out that if you’re banking on one good day to save your sport, then you’ve made some pretty bad choices along the way. An optimist might counter that if one good day can save your sport, then maybe there wasn’t a whole lot wrong with it in the first place.