This was England’s first knockout-round win at a major tournament since 2006, when it beat Ecuador at the World Cup before falling to Portugal on penalties. The exits since then have seemed to alternate between galling failure (a loss to tiny Iceland at the 2016 European Championship) and utter humiliation (a group-stage exit from the 2014 World Cup, and a 4-1 thrashing by Germany in South Africa in the one before that). Before, and after, were those half-dozen penalty shootouts, and those half-dozen England defeats.

This World Cup, though, has been a complete turnaround in mood and results. England, which had long wilted under its country’s overly critical news media gaze, showed up in a positive mood, and preaching that this time — finally — would be different.

The players gave pretournament interviews with pleasure, then beat Tunisia in their opener and hammered Panama as a follow-up. Even a loss by their second-stringers against Belgium in the final group game had a silver lining: finishing second in the group placed England in what is clearly the easier half of the knockout-round bracket. If the English advance past unheralded Sweden, they would face not Brazil or Uruguay or Belgium again, but the survivor of the Russia-Croatia match.

That path will only raise expectations into the stratosphere, though. In Southgate’s news conference before the Colombia game, the second question posed to him was effectively this: With so many good teams out of the field, don’t you have a great chance to reach the final?

Southgate stayed off the Colombians’ bulletin board with a few clichés, but he knows exactly what is expected — and what can go wrong. He missed the final penalty in the shootout that saw England fall out of the 1996 Euros on home soil, and then saw his country go out of a World Cup by the same fate two years later.

He talked Monday about how he liked the way his team was playing, the freedom and confidence it had shown so far, and he said he hoped it would continue. “That shouldn’t change now that we’re in the knockout phase,” he said. “If anything, we should feel freer.”

They seemed to against Colombia, even as the game turned chippy and the referee, Mark Geiger of the United States, started showing his yellow card.