My admiration for sportspeople is always at its most intense at this time of year. After all, it’s the season when I can make it to the end of a week and realise that my food consumption, extensive as it was, consisted only of items in varying shades of beige. When I wake to discover mince-pie crumbs in my bed and sometimes in my hair. The only physical exercise I engage in follows a YouTube search on “Yoga for Digestion” and getting the rubbish to the bins feels like the 10,000m, requiring me to pace myself in the early stages and keep a water bottle to hand.

In these shortened, darkened days, those who discipline their bodies into marvels of mechanical engineering have my undying respect. The Olympic hopeful, eyes fixed on Tokyo 2020, shaking her head at the plate of satay skewers and leaving the party early so she can still make her 5am ergo, will never cease to amaze and silently shame me. The lower-league footballers boarding the bus for their Boxing Day fixture are instant heroes. I’m never more aware of the ocean of difference in our experience of life than in Christmas week, when professional sportspeople still have the iron will to go outdoors.

It is fitting, then, that this is also the time we hang baubles and decorations on those involved in sport for their contributions to our entertainment and general enjoyment of life. Arise, Geraint Thomas, Sports Personality of The Year. Vivat Harry Redknapp, King of the Jungle. It’s been a lean year in the glitterball stakes, admittedly, but Michael Vaughan is still an outside hope for the Strictly … Christmas special.

Then there are the collection of capital letters handed out like hangover cures on New Year’s Day – the MBEs, the OBEs, the big K. What English cricket fans didn’t get a warm and melty feeling at the news this week that Alastair Cook is hotly tipped to receive a knighthood? Assuming the reports are accurate, Cook will be the 10th English cricketer to get the full ceremonial sword treatment and it’s hard to imagine it happening to a more deserving or decent guy. Sir (Confirmation Pending) Alastair is the most prolific batsman and second-most successful captain England have had, whose modest bearing and keep‑calm‑and-carry-on demeanour practically demanded its own part in Downton Abbey. He keeps sheep and goes shooting with Sir Ian Botham. What better qualifications could he have?

Cook was already, like the former England Women captain Charlotte Edwards, a CBE, so he was presumably used to walking into dinner ahead of Jimmy Anderson OBE. (It’s possible Stuart Broad MBE has to sit at a lower table.) But for an England player to be knighted so soon after the end of his international career is unprecedented. It is less than three months since we were choking up at his final Test century, then quietly sobbing into a hankie at Anderson’s best‑friend tribute. Cricket‑loving Theresa May is believed to have pushed matters along; proof that the prime minister can still make things happen, provided they’re actually a good idea in the first place.

No one’s pretending that these kind of honours don’t come with their own Santa sack of issues. It doesn’t take a Bill Frindall to analyse the list of sporting knights and dames and deduce that they’re an utter crapshoot or that most of the gongs have been awarded to fairly patrician pastimes. Yachting and motor racing have 15 Ks between them. Boxing has one.

But Cook’s elevation puts him in very rare company indeed, not least because almost every one of England’s other cricketing knights is dead. Only Sir Ian is still available for a chat about which side to wear your badge. Or was born after 1932. You sense Cookie could do with a more whimsical nickname if he’s going to fit in with Plum Warner or Gubby Allen or even Sir Henry Dudley Gresham Leveson-Gower, known to his friends as Shrimp.

Shrimp was a jolly good fellow, the type who could go up to Magdalen, Oxford, spend four years captaining the Blues and still emerge without a degree. Then there’s Sir Francis Eden Lacey, the first person to be knighted for services to sport, back in 1926. According to Wisden, Lacey was “a stylish bat” and “a capital field” (he also, from his photographs, bore a surprising resemblance to the American actor John C McGinley). He played for Hampshire and scored 2,589 first-class runs at 32.77. Cook scored six times as many runs in Tests alone – at 45.35.

But then, in the old days, you tended to be knighted for your usefulness in the committee room rather than at the crease. Three years after Lacey, Sir Frederick Toone joined the knightage (real word, I looked it up) for services to cricket despite never playing a first‑class match. Also despite spending the mid-20s under surveillance by MI5 and being a member of the British Fascists.

So it could be that Cook, who will continue to play for Essex next year, is the best cricketing decision Her Majesty’s ever made. He’ll certainly be the only knight of the realm to show up for pre-season training at Chelmsford or to perform his chivalric duties to a County Championship audience of five retirees and a cluster of seagulls.

Before then, plain-old Alastair will be celebrating Christmas and his birthday (he was born on 25 December 1984). And while most of us are sleeping in or starting the day with a buck’s fizz, he’ll be out there feeding his sheep. For that kind of valour, I wouldn’t be surprised if he joins the late Lord Cowdrey one day, with a peerage.

• This article was amended on 23 December to correct a statistic – Alastair Cook scored approximately six times as many runs in Tests than Sir Francis Eden Lacey managed in first-class matches for Hampshire, not 10 times as originally stated