The pubs were full tonight. They won't all be open in a year.

The pubs were full tonight. For a nine o'clock kick-off on Wednesday 17 June, with England opening their World Cup, every room in the country with a tap and a television did the trade of a normal week in a single evening. If you walked past a busy one around half-time, the score at 2-2 and the noise spilling onto the pavement, you would be forgiven for thinking the British night was in rude health.

It is worth being careful with that picture. A tournament night is a spike, not a recovery. The crowd that filled the pub tonight is the same crowd that, on an ordinary Wednesday, stays home, and the venue still has to pay its rates, its staff and its energy bill on all the ordinary Wednesdays in between. One good night does not reset a bad year.

I have been filing the slower story on this page for a while now, and it has not changed because England won. The places where this country gathers after dark, the pubs but more sharply the small music venues and clubs, are being closed less by any ban than by a bill. Business rates, rents and energy costs fall on a late-opening room far harder than on a shop that shuts at six. The economics of staying open past midnight have been quietly worsening for years. A World Cup does not touch that. It just hides it for ninety minutes.

The late kick-offs sharpen the point. Because this tournament is played in North America, England's matches land at nine, ten, later. That favours the room you can fall out of and walk home from, the local, over the one you travel into town for and pay a door charge to enter. The spike, in other words, lands on the pub and the supermarket, not on the late venue that was already struggling. The tournament is generous, but it is generous to the survivors.

Here is the thread I keep pulling. As work asks less of our days, the question of where we spend our freed evenings becomes a real one, and the honest answer is that the infrastructure for spending them together is thinning while we argue about everything else. The country clearly still wants the shared room. Tonight proved it could fill one in an instant. The slower question is who will own the dark in five years, and whether there will be anywhere left to do this on a night when there is no match on to license it.

The pubs were full tonight. Enjoy that. Then notice which of them are still there when Ghana come around on the twenty-third, and which were full tonight precisely because they are the last ones standing.