After the Tonga game, while beaming, he talked us through the torment.

He has 76 caps now, but the time away made him sound like a man who had just won his first. Was he nervous making his comeback? Yes, but he was more nervous for his family that they wouldn’t have to sit through something else going wrong.

“I’m doing it all for them at the end of the day,” he says of his wife, his four children and his extended family. “All those dark times of the summer, they’ve been with me the whole time. So it was more of a celebration for them as well, not just me.

“It was really special, but I won’t lie, I saw them at the anthems and I got a little bit of a wobble, but it was all right. It was good.

“I was just buzzing to be back. I was a bit rusty, but hopefully I can build on that.”

The summer had been hard. Selected to go on his second Lions tour, he went south to get suited and booted.

The excitement level was through the roof. At tighthead, there was himself, Tadhg Furlong and Will Stuart.

Furlong was the favourite for the Test jersey, but Fagerson was flying. Or, at least, he had been flying.

No tighthead had played more minutes in the Six Nations than the Scot. Those who saw him playing regularly knew he was a proper Test contender, but the first of the calf problems had surfaced by then, so there was uncertainty in his own head.

“I felt I was in good nick, playing all right,” he said. “And it all got taken away from me pretty quickly. I think I could have given a good account of myself over in Australia.

“I had that first calf tear and then I was coming back from that and I got back to running and it was going well. And then I got the green light to keep pushing on.

“And then the same calf, I had another tear of a different muscle because of a bunch of other things that we didn’t pick up. So that was brutal.

“I then got back to a point where that calf was grand, but because I’ve been compensating so much on my left side, that flared up as well.”

Fagerson withdrew from the Lions squad in early June. “There was a point where I was going to go out with the national team [Scotland were touring in New Zealand] and then I was going to possibly get called out [for the Lions] afterwards,” he recalled.

Injury destroyed all of that.

“I’d had such a mental rollercoaster I just said, you know what, I just want to have a break and get on with it,” he revealed.