Can we be among the first to say how much we miss the old, roofless Centre Court? Those were golden days, weren't they? The lowering clouds, the sudden downpours, the richly evocative hiss of tarpaulin across closely trimmed lawn?

Gone, now. Quite gone. Next year there will be a mechanical dome over the place and anything up to 15 men in green polo shirts will be drinking tea and reading Nuts for the fortnight. More sorrowful still, an all-new, weather-proof men's singles final will get under way at the appointed hour, without fail, and, unthinkably, will continue until it is done.

Never again, then, will we see the like of the extraordinary, rain-protracted drama of Sunday's classic face-off between Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal - a match whose escalating tension owed at least something to the weather delays that forced it deep into the evening. And never again will Wimbledon's showpiece occasion barrel on so spectacularly through the television schedules, leaving nothing but balled-up copies of the Radio Times in its wake. (The news? It can wait. And catch you later, George Gently, whoever you may be.)

Say farewell, too, to nearly invisible presentation ceremonies - the Duke of Kent easing his way gingerly along the red carpet with his arms outstretched for fear of bumping into stray ballboys; the victor's careful lap of honour turned into a stop-frame animation by the flickering flashbulbs. It will all be under kitchen-style strip-lighting (or something similar) from now on.

Dark? Why, on Sunday night you could barely see the big-brand logos in front of your face. (The BBC doesn't do advertising, but it does do lingering, full-screen close-ups of Nadal's Nike Air tennis shoes, which has to be the next best thing.) It's a sad passing because, for sheer weight of emotional baggage, televised sport has few settings to offer such as a roofless Centre Court at sundown. Wimbledon produced two lastingly memorable, properly nation-binding broadcast occasions this year - Federer versus Nadal and the five-set turnaround between Andy Murray and Richard Gasquet - and it's no coincidence, surely, that both matches reached their crisis in an overwhelmingly evocative summertime gloaming, the players battling on almost ridiculously against the failing light, until their parents were shouting out the back door for them to come in for bedtime.

Of that pair of matches, Sunday's was the outright, file-away classic. We were, as Andrew Castle said during that gobsmacking final set, watching “a different tennis than we have ever seen”. Indeed, afterwards, in the BBC's end-of-Wimbledon montage, the reprised shots from only six days earlier of Murray, gurning after every point and flexing his comparatively underwhelming muscles, did seem to have been plucked from another, lesser drama in another, more easily pleased age. Had we ever been that young and that naive?

It was a cracking finale, though, and the BBC rose dependably to meet it. There aren't many broadcasting marriages as natural as that between the BBC and the All England Club. They go together like David Attenborough and apes. Wimbledon may one day end up on ITV, but presumably by then there will be a roof not only over the Centre Court, but over hell, too.

You see things in these fortnights that are hard to find elsewhere. The Centre Court has, for instance, no big screen, beaming the television pictures to the crowd. It is, accordingly, pretty much the last place on earth in which the camera will show you people reacting to the action rather than reacting to the sight of themselves on television. (Contrast the redundant footage of the crowd on Henman Hill, permanently waving to itself. Surely even the most diehard fans of postmodernism are wearying of this routine now.)

You also notice, during Wimbledon, an increasingly old-fashioned trust in the power of the images, demonstrated by everyone involved in bringing them to us. Well, almost everyone. John McEnroe is a supreme anecdotalist, wit and high-value stream-of-consciousness merchant, but his talents belong either alongside Sue Barker on a rainy afternoon, on a rooftop with John Inverdale after everyone has gone home, or even, more properly, on the radio.

It was, accordingly, no great sorrow not to have McEnroe on board in the commentary box for the closing stages of the final - and a bonus to find the analyst's role, at this library moment for tennis on television, going to Tim Henman, who spent much of his Wimbledon debut as a pundit saying courageously little and instead cultivating a “strong but silent” image.

Ambitious in the context, you could argue. But, as unfashionable as it is to mention it, silence does the job sometimes. It may seem an ungrateful thing to say about a commentator, but the truly top-class aspect of Castle's handling of that astonishing final was how often he shut up. He left it to the pictures and the shouting crowd. It was enough.