Wayne Rooney played on for nearly 17 years after the 2004 European Championship but for many of us, despite everything he achieved in his brilliant career, all the records for Manchester United and for England, all the trophies and all the landmarks, he will always be preserved there in those balmy evenings at the Estadio da Luz amid the brief flowering of a nation's hopes and dreams.
When Rooney announced his retirement as a player on Friday, the news transported some of us straight back to that golden summer in Portugal, walking through the pines that ringed the Estadio Nacional outside Lisbon to watch Rooney train in the morning sunshine, believing for the first and last time in the lives of the post-1966 generation that England were going to win a major trophy.