With 94 minutes of football already played at a clammy and frazzled AufSchalke Arena, with England 1-0 down to Slovakia and about to exit the European Championships in miserable fashion, with the entire Age of Gareth poised to sink into a toxic farewell, the range of possibilities for the next few seconds seemed fairly stark.
Forty minutes later England would leave the pitch victorious, 2-1 winners of their last-16 tie after extra time, drenched in the sweet, sweet sounds of Sweet Caroline, and ready now for a quarter-final against the Swiss on Saturday.
They were propelled there by a stunning intervention from Jude Bellingham, and by an extra-time winner from Harry Kane as Slovakia briefly fell apart. How exactly, did we get from there to here? This was a moment of genuine double take, to the extent it even felt a little subversive. English sporting failure has a rigid, unforgiving kind of shape. We know the muscle memory of these occasions too well. This is after all just people in shorts standing around doing things.
There was a circularity too. Eight years on from the last great English men's footballing collapse, the all-time-low of defeat to Iceland in 2016, England seemed to be turning Southgate's final game at these Euros into a repeat of the game that bungled him into the job as a replacement for the replacement.
Here we had yet another bedraggled defeat to a likable minor nation in blue, fringed by the boos and roars of your own supporters.
You can change the culture, lift the spirits, become the subject of an uplifting West End play about reimagining England. But the island is still an island. The island, Gareth, is us.
Anyway. That's what didn't happen. Instead Bellingham decided to do something else.
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