No more Fery-tales: fantastical fever dream is over and now the hard work starts

The last person in the stadium who truly believed was Fery himself, outclassed but never outfought, a 5ft 9in battery pack in a world of power plants

Well, we were beginning to run out of ferry puns anyway. Arthur Fery’s run to the semi-finals of Wimbledon always had a kind of glazed and surreal quality to it, a shaggy-dog story that kept adding more and more unbelievable layers: the fling that ended in marriage, the picnic that turned into an all-night rave, Super Hans accidentally running to Windsor.

When reality finally bit, it bit slowly and then all at once. It was when Sascha Zverev broke serve early in the second set that people first started to leave their seats: not many, but certainly enough to notice. Perhaps this was the moment a little of the air, a little of the belief, first began to leak out of Fery’s fantastical fever dream, a marvellous journey that – if we’re being brutally honest with ourselves – was probably always going to end like this.