It seemed as if the summer holidays would never end and then, overnight, without a moment to prepare, you are back at school and your favourite teacher has left and your best friend has a new best friend and the teacher you hated is in charge of your form and it’s raining and it’s tapioca and double maths.

That’s how it feels at the end of the great adventure. The adventure - Jonny Wilkinson’s word, and gloriously apt – had gone so well that we thought it would never end. But it did, foundering on the reef of bitter reality as England met South Africa in the World Cup final and learnt a lesson about lineouts, discipline and the eternal cruelties of sport.

It’s not that I mind reality. I can take it. I can take it in quite serious chunks; after all, I’ve been following England’s sporting fortunes for years. But this dose is harder than most because it seemed as if we had before us incontrovertible evidence of a world of the most luxurious fantasy.

The England rugby boys, over the past few weeks, had taken us to the island where dreams come true. We believed in fairies, Tinkerbell could not die, dragons existed, but only to be slain by princes. Reality didn’t have a chance. And as the final approached, we knew, we accepted, that South Africa had the better rugby team.

But what difference does that make when the fairies are on your side? France had a better rugby team, Australia had a better rugby team, Tonga had a better rugby team, for God’s sake. But they had all been been beaten as England’s adventure lost touch with reality as we know it.

It was all so different from the mood in Sydney four years ago. Back then it was heavy, serious, intense: I hope to God that nothing goes wrong. Actually, quite a lot did, until Jonny’s magic boot rescued the team, so that in retrospect the event is bathed in fantasy. But it wasn’t magic back then; it was plumb old grinding reality. England were the best team and they were able to prove it. Just.

But this time the mood was almost light-hearted, almost carefree. Nothing to lose. Miracle to get there. And hell, they could even win the bloody thing. Thus England made the most magnificent swallow dive off the top board and then discovered that there was no water in the swimming pool.

It was the most horrible shock. South Africa were just better. They looked like a team who had prepared for four years, England like a team who had prepared for four weeks. South Africa came with a long-term plan that worked, England did so with a short-term fantasy that withered and died.

I do not propose to criticise. That would be like criticising the Harry Potter books because Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry doesn’t actually exist. Better just to wish it did. Certainly, the England team would have come top in transfiguration, transforming themselves over four weeks from a rabble to a group of men inspired. No, best to focus on the journey.

For it really has been a thing of wonder, a tale of a beauty, a fairy story. It had a wonderful shape. England went into the tournament as the worst, the most embarrassed world champions the world has gazed upon. They were embarrassed by the United States and humiliated by South Africa. We all wrote them off – a team without heroes, a team without hope. They wouldn’t even qualify for the knockout stage.

But, doggedly, raggedly, they did. They beat Samoa and Tonga well enough. Humph. They’ll get hammered in the quarter-finals.

But they didn’t. Heroes emerged, as they should in all good fairytales. Andrew Sheridan, the one-man scrum, Andy Gomarsall, the yapping little boss behind him. Australia could not believe it, could not believe that reality would desert them so intemperately.

Surely France in the semis was a game too far. But it wasn’t.

The tale kept unfolding. Couldn’t stop unfolding. And at the end it was as if Time itself had taken England’s side. England were rescued by Wilkinson, the Dr Who of English sport, stepping from the Tardis to take England back in time to that night four years ago when he kicked them to glory. And he did so again, although a match too soon, and England were in the final.

What a tale, what an adventure, what a joy, the more poignant for being so absurdly unexpected. All logic said that England had no hope, but logic had walked out in a pet, leaving the wildest fantasies to luxuriate. True, there was always a fragility about the whole thing, but that’s what made it all so wonderful. It was the very impossibility of it all that was so inspiring.

But South Africa were the perfect opposition to fantasy. They hung up imagination with their blazers and left entertainment in their Y-fronts; in jockstraps and Springboks shirts they came out to do nothing but win.

They came out to kill the game, they came out to kill the story, they came out to kill the magic, they came out to kill Bambi’s mother – and succeeded immaculately. Doff your hats, bow, they did it superbly.

As for England, we are left with a fairy story; a great fairy story, but, alas, one in which nobody lived happily ever after.