Regrets and mistakes, they're memories made
Who would have known how bittersweet this would taste?
With all due respect to the day's headline musical act, Rita Ora, and the polite reception she received - including from an impressively attentive Lord's pavilion - it was Adele who said it best … over the ground's PA system, during Australia's first drinks break.
By then, Beth Mooney and Phoebe Litchfield had muscled their side along to 62 for 1 in the powerplay, and the Women's T20 World Cup final was as good as over. At which point, England's increasingly morose players were serenaded with a burst of "Someone Like You", a ballad about unrequited love, and the need to move on.
And move on they must … to another date with Lord's, in fact, in just five days' time. Nat Sciver-Brunt was already on the brink of tears as she spoke to the media soon afterwards, so she wasn't desperately keen to be reminded of the next phase of her team's glass-ceiling-smashing summer.
You wait 239 years for this, an unequivocal moment in which women's cricket takes centre stage at Lord's - with no caveats, or double-headers, or under-currents of tokenism. And you find you have to do it all again next week, for the venue's (even more historic?) maiden women's Test match.
But is this simply what it means to have arrived in the Big Time? Perhaps, in the curious world of English cricket, this - right here - is the destination at the end of the journey.
The chat before the tournament had been about how England's women had the chance to emulate the recent success of the football and rugby teams, and in the process steal a march on their trophy-less male counterparts. But perhaps true equality is the chance to be bombarded with questions about the unrelenting international schedule, and the need to adjust to a red-ball focus at a moment's notice. All set to a background thrum of celebrating Australians, of course.
It was a point that Heather Knight had made in the lead-up to the tournament, when she had performed an audible eyeroll after a question about the transformative potential of this latest big moment for the women's game.
"When we get to the point where everyone stops asking how far the game's come, we'll know we're in a very good place," Knight had replied.
We are clearly not there yet, because this occasion was as far from run-of-the-mill as it gets: "A moment in time for cricket", as Sophie Molineux, Australia's captain, eloquently put it - and she's seen a few in her decade-long career, including the extraordinary 86,174 crowd that packed into the MCG for the 2020 final.
But we are really not far off either, because the curious paradox about this day of days was how unexceptional it all felt.
All the trappings of a mega-match were in place - the bottom half of the Wellington Road was even closed to traffic, which is the surest sign that the ICC had rolled into town. And yet, no sooner had 28,887 fans passed through the turnstiles to set a new record for a women's cricket match in England than the narrative reset and a new normal took hold, rather like the anticlimactic return to Level 1 after the boss-level of an interminable platform-computer game.
Of course it would have felt different had England managed to defy what turned out to be insurmountable odds, and maintained that remarkable (and daunting) record of never having lost in a home World Cup final. But the fact that they didn't - and the fact that their fate looked to have been sealed from the moment they lost the toss - meant that a knowing pessimism gripped the old ground, right from the moment that Kim Garth's first ball of the match was greeted with pindrop silence.
There's plenty to love about an expectant hush, of course. It's a trait that Lord's shares with another ancient London institution, Wimbledon (although that venue, to give it its due, has given its gentlemen's and ladies' competitions roughly equal billing for more than a century and counting).
What England really needed, however, was something more akin to a People's Monday or a day-five kids-come-free crowd, or even some of the learn-on-the-job rookies that so shocked the ECB with their enthusiasm when Anya Shrubsole swiped the 2017 final from under India's noses. They needed something more feral and partisan to help close the gap to a superior Aussie outfit. Instead, what they got was a knowing, anxious burble that oozed deference, both to the occasion and the opponents.
There were isolated attempts to get something going. Freddie Mercury's Live Aid "eeeh-ooohs" were pumped through the PA from time to time, while an ICC-sanctioned cheer-squad was dispatched to the boundary's edge to "make some noise" in the closing overs. But, as Sciver-Brunt acknowledged, none of that really managed to break through the tension.
"To be honest, all I could hear was my own family shouting 'Come on England!'", she said, which would have been fine had this been a 2,000-strong crowd at Northampton. "Any ground that I go to, I can actually pick out their voices. If the game was going a bit better for England, I'm sure they would have been a little bit louder."
But maybe this is just where the game is now. By the time of the next Women's World Cup, more than a decade will have elapsed since England's last global title, but whereas silverware was the only currency up to and including the 2017 win, it shouldn't have to be the only standard by which the women's game is judged. After all, England has just presided over a home tournament in which more than 245,000 fans have attended across 33 matches - almost 100,000 more than the organisers' own projections.
"In 2009, we needed to win to get the exposure," Charlotte Edwards, England's head coach and Grand Dame, said, recalling her own team's victory in the inaugural Women's World T20, 17 years ago. "We've [already] got the exposure from this tournament. We've got lots of people following this team, and when I came into this job, I spoke to the players about changing the perception of the team. They've played with so much pride for the shirt, they've had energy, they've had smiles on their face, and they've absolutely loved it. I couldn't be more proud of them."
Success takes many guises - but it includes the right for failure to be accepted as part of the process. It's worked for the men for long enough, after all.