It was going to end in tears, wasn’t it?

Yet it ended rather well for Andy Murray in Paris even without a final medal to cap his lengthy and shiny career.

He got to hear the roars, got to feel the goose bumps that only a genuine tournament can generate, got to show the guile and grit that took him from modest and unlikely beginnings to three major singles titles, two Olympic gold medals, a Davis Cup victory and 41 weeks at world No. 1.

“Sometimes you still have to pinch yourself that it all happened as it did,” Murray’s mother Judy once told me. “You start off playing sponge ball tennis in the hall, and you come from a very small town in Scotland, where tennis is 17th in participation in terms of the sports that are played.

“It is amazing, truly. But what it shows you is that anything is possible. The talent has to be there, of course. It’s all over the world, but it’s not everybody who was able to develop the talent.”

The Murrays developed it twice: Jamie, the older brother, went on to become No. 1 in the world in doubles and win doubles majors of his own.

Andy, just 15 months younger, took the cues and inspiration, and as in other remarkable tennis families like the Roddicks and Williamses, took it a notch higher than his sibling.

Last month, the Murrays played doubles together one more time at Wimbledon, which was an emotional and satisfying form of farewell even if it ended in a first-round defeat.

But full closure for Andy came shortly before 10pm on Thursday night in Paris when two much younger stars, Taylor Fritz and Tommy Paul of the United States, teamed up to defeat Murray and his flashy, full-throttle partner Dan Evans 6-2, 6-4 in the quarter-finals of the Olympics.

The stadium was about half empty by that late hour but sounded like it was full. When Murray’s last shot missed its target, he and Evans embraced on the clay, and Murray was soon waving to the largely British crowd with tears in his eyes.

“Yeah, but it felt good,” Murray said. “I knew that moment was coming for the last few months. I knew it if didn’t happen today, it was going to be in a couple of days time. I was ready for it, and obviously I was emotional because it’s the last time I will play a competitive match. But I am genuinely happy with how it’s finished. I’m glad I got to go out here at the Olympics and finish on my terms because at times in the last few years that wasn’t a certainty.”

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Finishing on one’s own terms has become close to a platitude in sports, but it applies so well to Murray.

His career peaked in 2016, the year he won nine titles, including a second Wimbledon and that unprecedented second Olympic singles gold, and finished at No. 1 for the only time. It was a supreme effort considering the quality of his Golden Era rivals: Novak Djokovic, Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer. In 2016, Murray made clear, at least for a little while longer, that it was a Big Four, not just a Big Three, but his body could not take the strain.

He underwent hip surgery and then hip resurfacing surgery, which had been the end of the line for a singles player until he proved otherwise. He found the motivation and resilience to continue for eight more years after his peak season without nearly the same results or rewards.

“Never even liked tennis anyway,” Murray posted on Thursday night, a parting drollery that fooled no one but brought a smile.

How much he must have loved it to put himself through all that he did.

It goes back to the beginning, when he was five years old and still hitting both of his groundstrokes with two hands and learning the game with Judy and Jamie on the artificial grasscourts that were about 200 meters from their home in Dunblane, Scotland.

“Geography is destiny, really,” Judy said. “When he was five, I can very clearly remember Andy saying to me, ‘I’m fed up hitting balls. I want to play a proper match.’ And at the time, in the local leagues we didn’t even have under-10 tournaments in those days in Scotland.”

So Judy, once Scotland’s top women’s player, contacted a few coaches and asked them to bring some players in that youngest age group together for an informal round-robin tournament.

Colin Fleming and Elena Baltacha, both future professionals, were among those who took part, and five-year-old Andy got his proper matches.

“Three little ones, one set each,” Judy said with a laugh. “I can’t even remember how he did, but he had a great time. From that point on, he and Jamie just loved playing the game.”

No wonder he kept pushing, or as Federer says, kept squeezing the lemon. Murray came close to retiring in 2019. The Australian Open put together a video tribute. Taking the hint, I even wrote what amounted to a farewell column for The New York Times, which, in my defense, did at least contain a hopeful quote from Juan Martin del Potro, the great Argentine talent whose career was shortened by a series of injuries and who lost to Murray in the 2016 Olympic final.

“Keep fighting,” Del Potro said to Murray. “I can imagine your pain and sadness. I hope you can overcome this. You deserve to retire on your own terms, whenever that happens.”

It happened on Thursday after Murray had thoroughly explored his talents and tolerance for pain and had abandoned his plans to play any more singles. It happened after Murray and Evans saved five match points to win their first round against Kei Nishikori and Taro Daniel; and after Murray and Evans saved two more to win their second round against Sander Gillé and Joran Vliegen.

Those dramatic victories gave Murray the kind of heat-of-the-moment adrenaline rushes that a departing champion deserves but often does not receive. And all those clutch winners and bearhugs were enough to get you dreaming of the perfect ending, even if you weren’t British.

But Fritz and Paul are a decade younger than the 37-year-old Murray, and are both ranked in the top 15 in the world in singles. No matter how much they might respect Murray’s body of work, they would like their own Olympic medals, thank you very much.

“We were pumped to win, but it is sad to see it end for Andy,” Fritz said. “He’s someone that I think both of us have looked up to for a very long time.”

To honour accuracy rather than succumb entirely to sentimentality, Murray was often no role model on court. He was a moaner and a groaner who often vented his frustration at his team and could give the impression that tennis was more burden than blessing.

He acknowledged as much on Thursday night.

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“I wish I’d behaved differently at times on the court,” he said. “But there’s lots of things, like my character on the court, that I did like."

Disappointment did not ground him. Far from it, and his timing guaranteed that he would have to deal with it. He reached 11 Grand Slam singles finals: more than Boris Becker and Guillermo Vilas and as many as John McEnroe, Mats Wilander and Stefan Edberg.

But Murray only won three, losing the other eight to either Federer or Djokovic. Murray went 0-5 in Australian Open finals, the only player to have done so.

In the final balance, he was unquestionably a distant fourth in his era but there is not a smidgen of shame in that. He certainly made the victories count: winning his first Olympic gold at the London Olympics in 2012 on the grass of the All England Club and then ending a 77-year drought for British men in singles at Wimbledon the following year.

“History Boy,” read the headline in The Times of London the next morning. That has quite a ring to it in a country with no shortage of history, sporting and otherwise.

Murray and his family did it their way from a moonshot destination long on rain and links golf courses and short on indoor tennis courts. They made it work with the right attitude and fortitude.

“If I went back to the beginning of my career, when I started in Scotland, no one standing here, myself included and my family, none of them, would have expected that I would have gone on to do what I did,” Murray said on Thursday. “Even when I was 18, 19 years old, there were still a lot of people who doubted my ability, talent, work ethic and mentality.”

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Murray took pride in his grit and in tweaking the establishment. As someone who had once been coached by his mother and who married tennis player Kim Sears, Murray also believed in the value of the women’s game, defending its merits and employing former world No. 1 Amélie Mauresmo as his coach during his prime.

“An incredible guy who thinks about everything and is very level-headed,” Mauresmo told L’Équipe during these Olympics. “He knows his strengths and weaknesses very well and is very lucid in many situations, on court as well as in everyday life.”

It seemed fitting then that Murray played his last match on the Suzanne Lenglen Court, named for one of the sport’s greatest women’s players.

It also seemed in tune with the time that he and Evans saved one more match point before Sir Andy went the way that all champions must eventually go, signing quite a few autographs before he made his way, with his lumbering gait, out the door and into the rest of his life