This: this is what you could have won.It was a night that bordered on the lunatic, flirted with the impossible — a rolling, shape-shifting diorama of human joy and suffering. It was football as a shaken-up fizzy drink, impossible to tamp down once it had been cracked open. It was the kind of experience that you would have needed some kind of celestial pause button to even vaguely comprehend; it wasn’t just that things were happening, it was that literally everything was happening, all the time. 112 minutes times infinity is infinity.It was a game that we will rightly layer meaning onto, in the immediate aftermath and then for years to come. Not many events feel historic in real time. This did. For England especially, it will go down as one of the great World Cup stories, a gallant victory of the spirit achieved in a state of physical ruin.There was, though, something else here, too. Something valedictory, a note of melancholy sounding against the boisterous celebrations of the England fans.It was a night of goodbyes — to this admirable Mexico side, to Mexico itself, to the people who have made the southern leg of FIFA’s bloated competition its best experience, its dislocated heart. To the Estadio Azteca, which here provided a blueprint for what big-tournament matches like this should look like, what they should do to your soul. And, yes, to the departing version of the World Cup with all of this still in play.Mexico’s heartbroken players applaud their fans after defeat to England (Michael Regan/Getty Images)First: the team. This is not a constellation of stars. Gilberto Mora, a little sugar snap of a midfielder, will go far. There are a couple of biggish names. Beyond that, we’re talking grafters, journeymen, guys who have never played outside of Mexico. That sounds like a dig but it is the opposite: they have proven that they can compete, can carry the flag. One of the great tragedies of the Mexican game is that it never quite managed to build on the promise of the 1986 World Cup here. It is not a mistake you expect them to make again.