There was much disbelief and a fair degree of mirth after the final whistle sounded in that breathtaking match in Paris on Sunday night, when realisation dawned that dear old England, Steve Borthwick's boring army, are the only Northern Hemisphere team left in World Cup 2023.
We hear a great deal - particularly in this country - about how best to manage the 'World Cup cycle'. Maybe England have shown us the way. Namely, by doing everything arseways for three years so as to show up at the tournament having developed the requisite siege mentality.
Since 2021, England have won six of 15 Six Nations matches, including losing three from three to both Scotland and Ireland. They've been beaten at home by Argentina. They sacked their highly paid, world renowned head coach less than 10 months out from the start of the tournament.
Their incoming coach promptly bigged up his new charges by announcing that they "weren't good at anything." This soon appeared an overly generous assessment after they conceded 53 points at home to France in March. In the autumn, they broke new ground by losing to Fiji for the first time.
Meanwhile, at club level, barely a month went by without news of another historic side going to the wall. Amazingly, Wasps, two-time European champions and six-time Premiership winners, are no longer a going concern and their Wikipedia begins in the past tense.
But now - without having gotten substantially better - England are back in the World Cup semi-final, a stage of the tournament which remains closed off to Ireland. Thousands of previously apathetic English rugby fans, the bulk of them dressed in Crusader garb no doubt, are shuffling across the Channel ahead of the semi-final with South Africa.
The hero of England's World Cup journey is undoubtedly World Rugby CEO Alan Gilpin, whom Jim Hamilton informs us has owned up to being the man who decided there was no time to waste in holding the draw for the tournament back in 2020. It has since established itself as the most infamous draw in Irish sport since Liechtenstein '95.
Suffice to say, the draw could hardly have been more favourable had it been conducted in private by Will Carling and Austin Healy, with Rory Underwood's mother serving as the sole independent adjudicator.
But then - maybe England fans might counter that they were due some good karma after the awkward draw in 2015, which led to unparalleled humiliation in their home tournament. Or even four years ago, when they delivered the performance of a lifetime to down the All Blacks in the semis but appeared emotionally spent against the fresher Springboks in the final.
English rugby pundits, especially those appearing on Irish media, have adopted a mildly sheepish 'snooker-player-availing-of-a-fluke' disposition regarding the current situation. By contrast, England fans on social media have revelled in their good fortune and leaned in hard on the tribal bantz, taunting the Irish supporters about their knockout record.
Borthwick, somewhat clipped and cold in his dealings with the critical English media, insists his team have silenced the doubters.
"A lot of people said we wouldn't get out of the pool. We got out of the pool, now we got out of the quarter-finals," the England coach said in his press conference last weekend.
This may be over-egging it just a tad. In the wake of the autumn loss to Fiji, it was certainly floated as a possibility that England might not escape the pool, though this was then regarded as merely plausible as opposed to likely.
While they did turn the tables on Fiji in the quarters, it would be hard to cast the six-point win there and the highly fortunate one-point win over Samoa as a resounding 'boo-ya!' to England's many critics at home and abroad.
"The general consensus about England [before the tournament] was that they're not very good but they'll probably make the semi-finals of the World Cup," said Alex Lowe on the Ruck podcast last Monday.
True, they did beat fellow semi-finalists Argentina in their pool opener, a match notable for the surreal number of handling errors committed by the Pumas. With the suspended Owen Farrell applauding from the stands, George Ford delivered a retro display of relentless drop-goaling reminiscent of Jannie De Beer.
England were almost gleeful in their conservatism that evening and it was apparent they were intent on 10-man rugbying their way through the tournament, a la 2007.
They also had recovered some of their ancient snarl. With relatively few big wins to celebrate over the preceding couple of years, England's players had resolved to celebrate little wins with unseemly abandon and their forwards have taken to hollering like Marco Tardelli in the wake of every crooked lineout from the opposition.
Borthwick was at pains beforehand to invoke the spirit of '07, possibly minus the antipathy towards the head coach.
England once again entered that tournament in rag order, having been battered by 30 points in Jones's Road that March - their fourth loss on the spin to Ireland - and were humiliated 36-0 by South Africa in the pool phase.
Their extremely aloof coach Brian Ashton, associated with the pretty backline patterns of Bath, was bluntly informed by the senior players that they "wished for a more restrictive gameplan".
With this agreed upon, they proceeded to grind Australia into the dirt of Marseille in the quarter-finals, Andrew Sheridan becoming a prop forward folk hero in the aftermath.
Suddenly emboldened, they shocked the French hosts in the semis and weren't a million miles away against South Africa in a dreary decider. It remains the gold standard in defiant English over-achievement in World Cups.
The current campaign carries certain echoes of 2007, the cussedness and the back-to-basics gameplan, though there has been no scalp on the level of Australia or France yet.
Can they get close this weekend? South Africa's mad scientist Rassie Erasmus has tired of French Rugby's social media output and is only interested in what @EnglandRugby have to say.
The Telegraph's Jim White has urged England's neighbours to support Borthwick's boys for the sake of the north. Alas, hemispherical solidarity has never been an especially potent force and appears rather thin on the ground once again.
Anecdotally, we've heard from Irish fans who are instead hoping for two merciless blowouts this weekend, less out of antipathy to England and Argentina than out of a desire to see World Rugby further embarrassed for the lop-sided draw, hammering home the narrative that last weekend witnessed the 'real semi-finals'.
They may be disappointed. There is a long history of teams struggling to back up mammoth performances within six-seven days. South Africa's win on Sunday evening certainly meets that criteria.
England, with a simple gameplan, have almost zero pressure on them and no qualms about turning the match into a turgid spectacle. They might have generated just enough momentum to go down respectably this weekend.
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