Tim, you old tease, we miss you already. Yesterday, Tim Henman went out of Wimbledon in a match that was the perfect, prestissimo Henman classic, a match that encompassed every twist and turn, every possible emotion, oscillated from dross to brilliance and back again, made you care and made you despair, impossibly offered belief once again and then, at the end, dashed the cup of hope from your lips.

So it was with this second-round match; so it was with Henman’s career. It has been like the Vikram Seth novel – it may not have had the ending we were hoping for, but it has been a spellbinding read.

Henman has for years been the most suitable possible boy when it comes to representing our hopes at Wimbledon, but, alas, he married the bride of nearly-but-not-quite rather than the one we had earmarked for him. You can’t arrange a marriage with the bride of victory; she won’t play.

Savour the scoreline: it is echt Tim. Feliciano López, of Spain, beat him 7-6, 7-6, 3-6, 2-6, 6-1. Henman waited until he was a break down in the third set before finding his stride. At 0-2 in the third, there was despair in the air. “We love you, Tim!” “So do we!” So Henman reeled off the next five games, 11 of the next 14. He was devastating. But then devastation has always been a Henman speciality.

Oh, there was music in the air again. Tim the Tiger was back, stalking his wild way across the grasslands of Centre Court, and there was no one and nothing that dared stand in his way. It was all there, all those things that we remember: the spitefulness of the serve, the vindictiveness of the passing shot, the cold violence of the volley. The wit and the invention, the relish and the joy were all back.

So was the ever-so-discreet fist-pump and the little skip of self-congratulation. He even began the fourth set with a double-skip – an unheard-of indulgence. López, a big, dominating man who loves to volley, shrank in size and had the will plucked from him. I can’t believe he’s going to do it again, we all said. But look! He’s bloody well going to.

Only he didn’t. López went off for a pee, came back with the self-doubt somehow sluiced out of him and put together a final set of complete certainty. The only point Henman took off his serve was a double fault.

This was the set that brought back all the stuff that we also associate with Henman: the flubbed volley into the net with the court gaping; the killer forehand that takes wing and flies away; the caught-in-two-minds poke and, worst of all, the most painful shot in all of Henman’s considerable repertoire, the suicide leave – the dramatic withdrawal of the racket that generously permits the ball to clip the line.

We’ve all been there a hundred times. We know every shot and every idiosyncrasy as well as Henman does himself. He has been telling us the same tale at the same time every year since he made his great breakthrough in 1996. That’s 11 years of glory, 11 years of horror, 11 years of nearly-but-not-quite.

Henman gave his all, but in the end he wasn’t quite good enough. That was true yesterday; it has been true every summer for the past 11 years. All glory to him. There is no shame in being outplayed, only in giving up, and Henman has never done that.

He gave an address to the nation on the state of British tennis and expressed his belief that those who run the sport must be “passionate and determined to compete”. He could hardly have summed up himself more clearly.

Henman is a man of passion. It is the bedrock of his game. It is all half-hidden by his middle-class English manners, but beneath the muted mannerisms of the little skip and the fist-pump, there lurks a crotch-grabbing, hip-thrusting Jimmy Connors, a John McEnroe frothing at the mouth, a racket-smashing Goran Ivanisevic.

His passion and determination to compete have taken us on this wild and wacky ride. It has been hard and bitter agony, and I’ve almost enjoyed every minute of it. So has Henman. It is something to do with the great principle elaborated by a notorious American gambler: “The most exciting thing in life is winning. The second most exciting thing is losing.”

It has been an exciting week, then, one way and another, for us and for Henman. And guess what else he was talking about after the match. You’ve guessed it, staying positive. He’s taking a lot of positives from his two matches at Wimbledon this year. Has he ever taken anything else?

“Tim, do you expect to be here next year?”

“Absolutely.” Oh God.