I received an e-mail yesterday from a sports-hating colleague at this newspaper who had just seen a YouTube clip of me playing table tennis, and losing, in the 1992 European Championships team final. “Absolutely bizarre,” he wrote. “The sport. Your hair! And, my goodness, your shorts are FRIGHTENING!” The funny thing is that I found myself agreeing with him.

Not about the shorts, but about the surrealism of it all. Sixteen years on, it does not merely seem bizarre that I was traumatised by defeat that day, but that I spent a good part of my life whacking a ball over the net. Table tennis was the thing that animated my every waking moment, the thing that defined my sense of self-worth. When I think back to the tears that would sometimes follow defeat, it is difficult to suppress a disbelieving giggle.

In a few years’ time, John Terry will feel the same way about his penalty miss on Wednesday night. He will give witty after-dinner speeches about that fateful moment, write award-winning books about its meaning, take part in television documentaries with titles such as “From the Jaws of Victory” and “The Slip that cost Chelsea the Cup”. He may even give the whole thing a life-affirming twist by explaining how the experience of defeat gave him a deeper, richer knowledge of what life is all about.

The capacity to move on from keenly felt trauma is deeply embedded in nature, human and otherwise. We justify, we adapt; we create mini-stories that help us to rationalise the turmoil; we teach ourselves to see setbacks as stepping stones towards greater challenges.

Not that this process of renewal is straightforward. When Muhammad Ali was defeated by Joe Frazier in 1971, he explained that it was all part of Allah’s plan to make his life story even more heroic. He did not realise that this explanation of defeat contradicted his earlier claims that he was destined for victory. But then, as sports coaches know, the path to greatness is smoothed by self-delusion.

When George Orwell wrote 1984, a number of reviewers criticised the concept of Doublethink (the art of holding contradictory beliefs) for its psychological implausibility, not realising that it is integral to human nature. Even now, Terry will be constructing wholly implausible — but psychologically liberating — rationalisations of that awful slip, the process so subtle and implicit that he may not even notice he is doing it. Sport, like life, is about mastering the art of temporary insanity. The great danger for Terry is that he might brood on what happened on Wednesday, something that will preclude the emotional distancing that is necessary for perspective. Doug Sanders never fully came to terms with missing a 2½foot putt to win the 1970 Open Championship because he was never able to disassociate himself from it. When asked many years later if he ever thought about the miss, he replied: “Only once every 4 or 5 minutes.”

There is little doubt that the Chelsea captain’s pitiable remorse will furnish the world with the lasting image of that pulsating final: crying on the shoulder of Avram Grant, his big, strong, epic form shaking with the grief of having missed the penalty that would have handed Chelsea their first European Cup. A team man through to his marrow, we may speculate that his anguish was not derived from failing to get his hands on that famous trophy, but the profound guilt associated with having let his beloved club down.

But in the years to come we will celebrate that miss, not because it was the kick that helped Manchester United to the trophy, but because it will provide the opening lines of a new and invigorating storyline that will exemplify, once again, the endless resilience of the human spirit.