There was a stunning moment, late on Monday night, inside the illuminated spaceship that was Wimbledon with its new roof closed, when it seemed that Andy Murray had lost the game. A barrelling cross-court shot had gone long, and the cameras turned to the crowd for their reaction. If they had been auditioning for a tragic death scene on EastEnders they could not have done better. Jaws sagged open, hands clutched gaping mouths, eyes widened in horror.

There is nothing quite like a sports audience locked into a moment of triumph or despair for displaying sheer concentrated emotion. I have no doubt that it helped to drive Murray through those agonising moments when the match hovered between victory and defeat, but it did something else as well — it blew away all the niggling arguments about whether this was or was not a suitable person to be the nation’s hero.

Too cross, too monosyllabic, too unlike Tim Henman, too Scottish? As the game reached its climax none of that seemed to matter. What counted was that here we had that rarest of creatures — a home-grown winner.

Much debate has centred on whether Murray should be claimed as a Scottish or a British champion. Much debate, I should say, largely concentrated north of the Border, where these things matter more. But Murray’s skill and power, above all his grim determination to chase and retrieve every shot, have put him in a category that transcends those arguments, rendering them both petty and parochial.

There is something frankly adolescent about the need to define sporting heroes, politicians, pop stars or celebrity cooks by their nationality first and their achievements second. Surely by now we have outgrown the mentality that saw the need to report the sinking of the Titanic with the headline “Aberdeen man dies in liner tragedy” or to detect a centilitre of Scottish blood in a newly elected American president, thus showing that he owes his achievements less to his grasp of democratic principles than to his fortune in having had a great-uncle from Stornoway.

Why try to claim exclusive rights to a great player if he is performing on a stage where he is challenging the best in the world? Even if he were to win the championship, thus becoming the first British player to do so for 70-odd years, that would ultimately be less important than the combination of grace and variety of shot which makes him, potentially, a supreme practitioner of the game.

To back Murray is to back great tennis, whatever the colour of the flag you wave.

Of course we Scots are proud — if a little amazed — at having produced a tennis player of such quality. We even think that the truculence and lack of charm that characterised the early Murray were quintessentially Scottish and therefore part of the winning DNA. But it is interesting to see how, even north of the Border, Murray’s Scottishness has become less and less important as the chances of his success have increased. The memory of his injudicious (and joking) remark that, when it came to football, he would back “any side so long as it isn’t England” has faded; the graceless behaviour of the teenager has been replaced by the smoothly assured young man who now talks intelligently about the sport.

He wears Fred Perry outfits, with not a square inch of tartan. He plays down the fervent support he gets from Scots in the crowd. He has even acquired a touch of diplomacy, dismissing the fervency of the supporters who wave St Andrew’s Crosses rather than Union Jacks.

“So long as they are making a noise and supporting you, that’s all that matters,” he said. “The colour of the flag won’t be what makes the difference in the match.”

I dare say that Gordon Brown, as he promotes his ideas of Britishness, may wish he had coined the phrase himself. It could even be on the lips of the Queen today when she revisits the Scottish Parliament, ten years after she first declared it open. For what she will find is that the Union she represents has survived in remarkably good shape: the colour of the flag has not been as important as many people feared.

The idea that devolution would lead to separatism and the break-up of Britain has been put on hold. What Tam Dalyell, the anti-devolution former Labour MP, once called “a motorway without exits to independence” has turned out to be a route liberally supplied with slip roads to all sorts of other constitutional options.

For all that the Nationalists are running the country, the Scots remain imperviously wedded to the notion of a united kingdom. They may not share the climactic emotion of the Centre Court, but they recognise a good bet when they see one. The balance they like is a nation with a voice of its own, but the security of a strong union behind it.

And so, when Murray steps on to the Centre Court today, he will be cheered on by Scots in the crowd who will be backing a British player, by English fans applauding a tennis player who happens to be Scottish, and by an entire nation that simply wants him to win. It’s not a bad recipe for success, on court or off.

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