Well, what on earth happened there? Waking up this morning on day two of this World Cup to find their nightmarish, nine-wicket mauling by New Zealand was no dream, that is the question England must have been asking, longing for the video-gamer's temptation: pause, quit, restart.
With fewer people occupying 130,000 seats in Ahmedabad than there can be watching TalkTV at any one time, it was a match that began looking more like another of the World Cup's muck-about warm-ups than its much-hyped opener – and how England looked as if they could have used another of those.
Afforded, strangely, the chance to kick off a second tournament in a row, the holders set out to make a statement, roused by Jos Buttler's proclamation that, despite their status, they had come to attack, not defend.
Instead, what they delivered was, at best, a rusty show. What they got in return was a dismantling from start to finish, steadily picked apart by a Black Caps attack made up of last men standing, then devoured in rather more hasty fashion by sensational centurions Devon Conway and Rachin Ravindra (below), who ended the suffering with nine wickets and almost 14 overs to spare.
England's own batters posted nothing like a par score on what looked a belting wicket when Jonny Bairstow took 12 off the first over but seldom did again until it was New Zealand with blade in hand.
In seeking to defend it, though, their bowlers delivered precisely no highlights, the sole wicket to fall that of Will Young to a Sam Curran loosener down the leg-side. If this was Match of the Day, they'd have been on after the credits had rolled.
Buttler, captaining in this format in a tournament game for the first time, was outthought by Tom Latham, New Zealand's stand-in, who juggled his part-timers with all the aptitude of a seasoned department store manager at Christmas, having been left only a dozen players to choose from.
What to make of it all? A level head suggests this was simply too bad to be true, England having beaten the same New Zealand side three times last month, in convincing fashion on each occasion, and now left with little choice but to park their horror show quickly as they head to Dharamshala to meet Bangladesh on Tuesday.
Joe Root, whose return to ODI form was a bleak day's biggest positive, called for calm, echoed by his captain.
"There's a lot of guys in our team, who've played a lot of cricket," Buttler said. "We've beaten teams this way before and been on the end of these results before as well.
"We won't read too much into it, won't get too down on ourselves as much as we wouldn't get too high if we were on the other side."
Football's World Cup winners had been running a fine line in messing up their title-defences at the earliest possible opportunity until France ruined the trend by almost retaining the thing in Qatar last winter, but the cricketing powers hold decent insurance against any premature giant-felling courtesy of the roundest of round-robin formats.
This England have made an early hiccup a rite of passage en route to tournament success, though none previously have come so close to the starting bell.
Confidence and, perhaps more consequentially, net-run-rate have each taken a first-round battering and even one more loss in the next four matches would make things very sketchy indeed.
Weather may yet play its part, too, with the kind of washouts that dogged the tournament's warm-ups not out of the question.
In more ways than one, this experienced England side need their Indian summer to begin quickly.
