Those last nine minutes, the final throes of a wait that stretches back 56 years, stretched on and on into the distance. England’s players mustered the last few drops of energy in their exhausted bodies and dispensed them all not in the service of making something happen, but ensuring that something did not.
England’s fans, meanwhile, the 87,000 or so inside Wembley, whistled and sang and made whatever noise they could, searching for any displacement activity at all to make the time pass just a little quicker, to make it just a little more bearable. They waited, and they waited, and then, finally, it was over.