“Maybe I was a little bit nervous,” said Cobolli after the match. “Maybe I felt the pressure that normally I don’t feel. [I was playing] a quarter-final against a guy that already played a marathon match, [spent] many hours on court, ranking lower than me, so I felt like it was a chance to have a good day for me today.

“Maybe, like my team says, I wasn’t so humble since the first point, but I felt that it wasn’t my day. Can happen. Maybe he play better than the other matches. I don’t know. I didn’t see the other one. But I felt that his level is really high today.”

Where do we fit this on the improbability scale? When you consider where he started, Fery’s run feels like the most extraordinary breakthrough story to be seen at Wimbledon this century – and perhaps even since Boris Becker won the title at 17 in 1985.

After last year’s Wimbledon threw up the expected final between Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz, the 2026 event has been thrown into chaos by the Fery factor. He is the first male wild card to reach the semi-finals here since Goran Ivanisevic in 2001, and will now climb a remarkable 78 places on the rankings ladder, reaching the giddy heights of No 36 and replacing Cameron Norrie as the British No 1.

A man who has suffered with nosebleeds during this tournament, Fery is now operating in thin and rarefied air. But when asked about playing a semi-final on Friday, he sounded almost blasé. “[I’ll just do] what I’ve tried to do for the past 10 days. Yeah, just believe in myself, do the best I can do every match, give myself 100 per cent, and see then where that will take me.”

As the rest of us grow more and more light-headed, Fery’s sang-froid remains firmly intact.