With one sublime pass, the Lionesses have unlocked the door to football Narnia

Oh, the pass. The pass, the pass, the pass. With five minutes to go and the game in the balance, Lauren Hemp looked one way and then slid the ball under some kind of secret door that only she knew was there and into football Narnia. It found Alessia Russo in so much space that it was as if the ball had rolled off the pitch on the school playground and into someone else’s game.

Well, we’re all in Narnia now. 3-1. For the first time in 57 years, an England football team is in a World Cup final.

We can’t pretend to not know what it’s like. Sarina Wiegman’s Lionesses are the reigning European champions. For Wiegman herself, it’s the fourth major final in a row, two with the Netherlands and now two with England – a simply staggering achievement.

But for England fans, well, we’ve never known anything quite like this. The match turned on fine margins, but it turned on Australia the way it always seems to turn on us.

The world’s best striker, Australia’s Sam Kerr, scorer of the tournament’s best goal just minutes before, missed a glorious chance to equalise with five minutes to go – and scarcely a minute later, it’s 3-1. Game over.

It will be, for once, someone else’s turn to spend a lifetime stewing over the ifs and the buts and the maybes. Of how it could all have been so different. But rank injustice in sport is rarer than most fans like to think. Certainly most England fans. There is not one occasion, in all the twisted, toxic decades that England fans have endured, in which England have been “robbed”, when it also hasn’t simply lost to the better team.

More often than not, the best team wins, and that’s exactly what happened.

England really are the best team. The ones with the big game experience, one trophy already won, the winning mentality. The Lionesses do not rue their mistakes – they punish them in others.

Sarina Wiegman even said so at the end. She was asked how they’d got this far, and she gave a very straight answer. “Ruthlessness,” she said. “We really, really want to win.”

Dare we say it was Australia – The Matildas – filling England’s traditional role in every sense. Over there, at their home tournament, they’d allowed themselves to get carried away. The prime minister, Anthony Albanese, had been able to prevent himself making the rather ridiculous, attention seeking promise of a public holiday if the team won the tournament. As if the Australian players – already inexperienced at this stage of a tournament – needed any extra pressure heaped up on top of them.

All you can do, as an England fan, is exhale. Maybe get a beer from the fridge and enjoy it. Enjoy, specifically, the liberating absence of futile hope.

It’s not to say they haven’t skirted close. Lauren James has missed two matches for doing a Beckham. Somehow she’s gotten away with it. Sam Kerr really should have scored. Though even had she done so it would only have been to draw her team back level with a superior opponent. Rational reality is rather easier to see when you’re on the right end of it. England so rarely are.

For the third summer in a row, England are in the final of a major football tournament. That is quite incredible, and it only took a timetable shredding pandemic and an inspirational Dutch coach to do it.

And for the first time, quite possibly ever, the pervading emotion is not “no, we couldn’t… could we?” Instead it’s “yes we can”.

Yes, they can. They really can.