There is a certain kind of hero that never quite withers. Often it's a matter of timing, sometimes a sense of some lingering incompleteness, the vampiric lure of unspent possibilities. More often than not it is a matter of simply getting there first. If proof were needed that even the most jaded sporting cynic can still carry with them the kernel of that first adolescent crush it came this week with the confirmation that Mark Ramprakash had retired from cricket, news that brought with it a discernible spurt of awkward, but still soggily sentimental man-love, released across the blather of social media. Ramps! County cricket's brooding mini-colossus, its doomed poster boy, a man defined by the greatness-shaped hole at the centre of his career, now retired after 25 years of fraught, glorious, and latterly rather noble service.

In many ways it is a dual retirement. With Ramprakash something else goes too, the last imprint of an era, the epic drowned world of English cricket in the 1990s. Until very recently there were still others. Dominic Cork went only last year, revving off happily into a turbocharged future of semi-celebrity, motivational speaking, Sky Sports sofa slots and perhaps in time his own chain of Cork-branded motorway service station carvery restaurants. Ramps, though, is a more complex animal, not just the last man standing, but the most charismatically unignorable of that generation of bruised and fretful 1990s cricketers. For men of a certain age he was in his own time The One, a figure in whom – at a time when English cricket was peopled by ageing deadbeats and scowling squares – all hope, all possibility, all sense of alluring adolescent cool seemed to reside.

In fact to those under the age of 30 the massed elegiac Rampracuddle of the past few days may seem a bit overblown. Sky Sports News produced a hastily conjured press conference that had the unfortunate effect at first glimpse of making it look as though Ramprakash had been arrested. Plonked scrubbed and suited in front of a curtain, lights gleaming, menaced by invisible inquisitors, there was something oddly appropriate about this final return to the main stage spotlight, a shadow memory of Test match grillings past.

Even the highlights reel that followed seemed painfully knowing and arch, fronted with some faded England stuff before settling into a succession of wobbly handheld county ground camera-views, slow fat bowlers banished imperiously into unpeopled stands, unworthy half-track pies despatched with snake-hipped fury. The crowning moment of his career, that hundredth hundred, was commemorated with a congratulatory hug, not from Michael Vaughan or Andrew Flintoff, but from a chummy Scott Newman. Afterwards he got to hold up a very small bottle of champagne.

It is above all the sense of unwavering purity of purpose that will be missed. It seems almost inconceivable that an English summer will be allowed to pass off unaccompanied by the quiet certainty that at any given moment on some distant patch of green shadowed by creaking plastic stands Ramprakash will be taking guard, dipping his knees, rehearsing some imprint of unarguable straight-batted check-drive perfection, eyes popping with the thrill of yet another tilt at the sacred business of largely overlooked first class run-gathering.

Cricket is a sport of endless yearly renewal, and with Ramprakash there was never any real sense of a diminution of intensity. Right up until his final season he was still the most promising 42-year-old batsman in England, still wreathed in that old Ramprakash buzz that seems to have simply always been there. As a schoolboy cricketer his precocious run-scoring created a low-level London-wide wow. Aged 21 he was already a compelling Test debutant against West Indies: pop star handsome, and looking above all jarringly modern in among the tubby old men of England.

For the first time we saw that arching back-foot force through the covers, crushingly severe but also infused with athletic grace, like a man very precisely destroying a stud wall with a croquet mallet. Ramprakash scored 27 in the first innings and 27 in the second, a prelude to the effortless thousands to come. Except, of course, it wasn't. Instead 27 was about it, his final career average over the course of an international career that all too often saw him appear at the crease with a look reminiscent of the kind of panic-stricken cat that emerges from behind its sofa feet splayed, eyes boggled, ready to leap three feet into the air at the first sneeze.

There were two superb Test hundreds – hope! – but the deluge never came and instead, and beyond, there was simply the consolation of a magical backwoods longevity. In scoring his 50,651 career runs Ramprakash ran more than 380 miles, the length of England, with a bat in his hand. More than just a sense of trapped high-rev talent, there is also a sense of reproach in this feat. If there has been anything jarring about the serial eulogies of the last few days it has been the suggestion from former coaches and team-mates that Ramps was simply a flawed perfectionist, a rarified oddball. There is at times a collective shrug, an implied helplessness in the face of a grand talent with an unscratchable itch. This is not the whole truth. Ramprakash wasn't flawed in the manner of Graeme Hick, his debut-mate and fellow lost talent, who at times seemed to lack that fast‑twitch athletic ruthlessness required to dominate the best bowlers, finding himself too often chased from the wicket like a bewildered C-3PO menaced by a pack of scurrying jawas.

Instead Ramprakash was a brilliantly accurate reflection of the system that produced him. If he was a mess he was our mess, a state-school outsider processed through the confusions of Lord's, hurled into a failing English Test team, dropped by English coaches, undermined by English captains, unprotected by the nourishing hothouse of central contract-dom, and allowed to droop instead as a grand native talent without an effective splint around which to wind its delicate tendrils. If England's best batsmen of the time, Graham Gooch and Michael Atherton, seemed to thrive on that background adversity, coming out to bat with the martyred determination of men very carefully and pointedly doing the hoovering after a particularly vicious marital row, Ramprakash felt only the sense of rising panic.

And so there he goes for the last time, cuffs buttoned, repelling the latest military medium offering with a gymnastic defensive push of epic scale, a cricketing Don Quixote toting about the imprint of his own thwarted greatness. Disappointed-looking men of a certain age may well breathe a sigh at his retirement: with Ramprakash still out there it was a little bit like the Stone Roses had never actually split up, but instead continued feeding tiny, perfect, limited edition demo tapes out through the letterbox to a small band of sandwich-munching satchel‑toting cognoscenti.

His retirement, though, is perhaps a more serious affair for county cricket, the passing of not just its most illustrious regular, but perhaps also its last great small-scale superstar. For many reasons, we will not see his like again.