It took 47 minutes of the Croatia game, when Jude Bellingham tore up half the pitch to put England in the lead, for the old sense of possibility to flicker. Maybe they could do it. Maybe this German knows what he’s doing. I immediately started scanning the calendar to make sure I would be available for the later stages of the tournament.

Britain, or, to give the country its full title, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, plus a handful of overseas territories and self-governing islands, was teetering on its pedestal around the time of World War I. Heavily in debt, it never truly recovered. Within earshot of the conclusion of World War II, India, the empire’s cornerstone, was independent. By 1966, the number of people under colonial rule had collapsed. In Britain, all of this registered as loss. Few stopped to think about what it meant for countries to win their freedom.

Despite a late spasm of imperial violence through the early 1960s, and the Falklands War of 1982, Britain’s time as a world power was over. Tony Blair’s New Labour may have governed over Cool Britannia, but plain old Britain, despite its nuclear weapons and undeserved seat on the United Nations Security Council, could no longer punch above its weight. Until the 2008 financial crisis, Britain suffered under the delusion that everything was, as they say, tickety-boo. A banking collapse that was among the severest in any major economy put an end to that.

In the two decades since, economic growth and labor productivity have stalled, and a traditionally phlegmatic nation is seething at Brussels, prime ministers, immigrants — anything except its own decline. In just a few years, Poland’s gross domestic product per capita is set to catch up with Britain’s. If you extract London from the data, the picture is even more bleak.

Why amid these struggles, you might ask, would Britain cut off relations with the gigantic trading bloc next door? An answer comes from the Brexit campaign itself, whose slogan was “Take back control.” That implied there was a past to which Britain could return that would be more prosperous and more British. In fact, Brexit incinerated economic growth, and public services worsened. Even today, there is little talk of reversing such an obvious act of self-harm.