The volley is superb: low, hard and right in the backhand corner. You couldn’t have placed it any more awkwardly with your two hands.

so Andy Murraydoubles back in retreat. Without so much as a glance, he lashes a backhand down the line, past his startled opponent, onto the line for a clean winner. “Oh, yes,” Andrew Castle purrs on the BBC commentary. Centre Court whoops and gasps. The year is 2017, the skies over Wimbledon are blue, and the top seed Andy Murray is about to go a set and a break up against Sam Querrey in the Wimbledon quarter-final. It’s also the beginning of the end.

Murray’s the world No 1. The defending Wimbledon champion. The defending Olympic champion. The preeminent figure in British sport, and certainly its most loved. He’s 30 years old and a couple of months, and after a career spent labouring in the shadow of his three mountainous contemporaries, this feels like his ascent, his moment, his time, perhaps even his era. And as you watch it back now, the knowledge that what you’re actually seeing is perhaps Murray’s last ever match at Wimbledon feels like an unforgivably cruel joke: a sick punchline you still can’t quite believe, even when you know what happens next.

What happens next is this: Querrey will break back and win the second set. Then, as the injury in Murray’s hip swells from a murmur to a warble to a full-blooded scream, the American will win 12 of the last 13 games, and the match with it. The following month, Rafa Nadal will take Murray’s cherished world No 1 ranking. And then about 18 months later – 18 months of invasive surgery and  interminable gym sessions and endless rehab and aborted comebacks and unimaginable frustration and agonising pain – he’ll call it a day. The tears will flow. In a faltering voice, he’ll talk of making it through one more season, one more summer, one more Wimbledon. But the weariness and the torment in his face will tell their own story. The pain, we’ll realise, wasn’t just physical. Murray’s had enough. He’s done. It’s over.