It is customary, when talking about the career of Tim Henman, which ended this weekend at Wimbledon, to strike a note of sorrow, of unfulfilled ambition, of ultimate failure; to ask why all those semi-finals were not finals, why the great win never came, how Henman, in giving us so much, left us finally unsatisfied.

I don’t propose to do anything of the kind. Not today. Today, it is only and entirely appropriate to celebrate Henman as an unbridled success, as an outrageous and spectacular fulfilment of everything his sport and his nation could possibly have wanted.

It is time at last to celebrate Henman as he truly was: Henman the winner.

I am not going to discuss the man who was not as good at grass-court tennis as Pete Sampras. God Himself would have struggled to beat Sampras at that time. Instead, let us all talk about the man who, for example, four years ago, won the Paris Masters by the simple means of beating (count them) Nikolay Davydenko, Sebastien Grosjean, Gustavo Kuerten, Roger Federer and Andy Roddick.

One hell of a bloody tennis player. Consistent top ten for most of his career, reached a high of No 4. That’s right, a British tennis player with only three players in the world better than him. Not that Henman was ever one to sit back on such a thing, but we who watch are entitled, at least now, to nod our heads and say: that really was very, very good.

Savour the shots, especially the volley that came in behind the spiteful serve. He was particularly adroit at finding a winner from a ball below his knees, hands and eyes trained by endless hours of practice, practice that came from an obsessive love of the game of smiting that began more or less when he could walk.

One day, the Campaign for Real Backhands will give Henman a special award: a classically elegant shot, longer reach than a double-fister and, when he timed it right, more options. Never physically imposing, Henman was, instead, long-levered, hungry for the ball, relying on timing and whip for his force.

Above all we must relish his appetite for strife. At periods of struggle – quite often self-imposed – he would so often find his best. That, by the way, is the secret of tennis: to play at your very best when the match is at its very hardest. I noticed this quite exceptional ability right from the beginning, as Henman beat the No 5 seed, Yevgeny Kafelnikov, in the first round at Wimbledon in 1996. That was the day he exploded into a nation’s consciousness.

Yet, even that day, he was not satisfied. Even then, raising his arms in triumph, he gave us nothing but a kind of intense, slightly frigid grimace. It meant “now for the next one”. Great attitude.

Before Tim, Britain was a tennis nation in which the phenomenon of a Brit in the second week was the stuff of headlines. Jeremy Bates! Not once but twice! Amazing! Then along came Tim and made the second week as a matter of course for damn near ten years, which is something worth shouting about.

He made the semis four times, and in 2004, just as we were about to give up on him, he made the semis in Paris, hitting his volleys on the red clay to an absolutely dismaying extent, then again in New York. A Brit making six grand-slam tournament semi-final appearances has given us, again and again, a seriously good run for our money.

Every tournament was an epic, every match a new and vivid chapter, a tale of fallibilities and heroics. The best and the worst of Henman often came quite frighteningly close together, but the best was something to behold. Yes, the laser-backhand, the wild brilliance of the running forehand, and above all, the intuitive brilliance of the million ways he played the volley.

But it was the sense of drama that Henman managed still better. Awkward and self-conscious in public appearance, in mid-flow, he became a ham actor dementedly overacting the part of himself, loving the attention, the support, the hysteria; loving, above all, the crazy feeling that every point he played was life and death. It was dementia – his own and the crowd’s – that always brought the best from him.

For years, we expected mere despair to follow Henman’s departure; instead, we have Andy Murray. Murray is one of the few unambiguous and unapologetic Henman supporters, and has often said that Henman showed him how to do it, that Henman showed him how a British tennis player can beat the world.

If Henman doesn’t leave a stable-full of Tims and Andys, it is hardly his fault. What he does leave is a tennis nation with higher hopes and higher expectations but, above all, a tennis nation that has just had the time of its life.

Henman left tennis by taking Britain to the World Group of the Davis Cup, something most Brits will not appreciate because we never get a chance to savour how fabulous the Davis Cup can be. “A perfect ending,” he said. Over the 11 years since that Kafelnikov moment, Henman has given Britain a greater number of peak moments and sustained periods of excitement than anyone else in British sport. Today is the day to acknowledge that.