We didn't win. We still had the summer of it.

There's a particular kind of quiet that follows a semi-final loss. The kind that settles over a garden once the shouting has stopped, when someone starts stacking the empty glasses and somebody else says, well, we got further than we thought we would.

It happened again this summer. No cup. No open-top bus. 

And yet.

Ask anyone what they actually remember from a World Cup summer and it's rarely the football. It's the neighbour who put a screen in the front garden and didn't bother asking anyone first. It's three generations arguing about the offside rule at the same table for the first time in a year.

We noticed it properly this year, because Noble Macmillan spent a lot of June and July doing the same thing everyone else was: gathering round something. Board games left out a little longer than usual. A journal on the side table, half-filled with a running commentary; the kind of thing that normally sits unused while people are outside, half-watching a match, half-catching up with people they don't see enough.

There's a case for saying tournaments like this are really just an excuse. Not for football, particularly, but for the long summer evening itself, for people staying later than planned, for a kind of togetherness that doesn't need a trophy to justify it.

So no, we didn't win in the way that's supposed to count. But the summer did what it always does regardless of the score: it pulled people back into the same room for a while.

Worth having a game or a journal to hand for the next one. There's always a next one.