Yes, an extraordinarily large, poignant and powerful funeral for Phillip Hughes. 

An amazing send-off for one taken so young and, as several writers have delicately noted, the extreme reaction to his death has been so overwhelming – even among people who never met him, and including people who don’t follow cricket – that it even has echoes of the death of Princess Diana.

In Diana’s case, much of the mass grief was put down to the fact that it occurred in the global media age. 

And yet, such mass misery as we have seen with Phillip Hughes has happened before in Australian sport, well before media was anything but local.

The most obvious example is what happened with the beloved boxer Les Darcy, the Muhammad Ali of his time. 

An idol of the people, many turned on him when he refused to join up for World War I, saying he would go only after he had earned enough prizemoney to pay for the house he had bought for his mother and family in Maitland.

In the end, not even that was ­possible for him as even the boxing promoters turned on him and he stowed away on a ship to America, where much the same thing happened.

His luck had just turned, however, and he had lined up a lucrative fight at last in Memphis, Tennessee, when he fell ill – likely due to mercury poisoning from a dental procedure. 

The love of his life, Winnie O’Sullivan, arrived just in time for his death, on May 24, 1917, and she then accompanied his body across America and then on the Sonoma across the Pacific Ocean to Sydney, where he arrived on the misty morning of Tuesday, June 26, 1917.

By that afternoon, the 21-year-old Les’s body was on view in an open ­coffin at Wood Coffill & Co’s funeral parlour in George Street, as tens of thousands of Sydney-siders filed past – the women crying, the men trying not to. 

Beneath an enormous crucifix, with lighted candles all around throwing out an ethereal and flickering light, Les lay there, dressed in his Sunday best, eyes closed, but looking content and at peace.

The pressure of the crowd against the plate glass windows became so great at one point that, with a dreadful scream of agony, they cracked and then collapsed.

Two days later, a Requiem Mass was held for Les at St Joseph’s, Woollahra – the very church where he and Winnie had hoped to marry.

From the church, the cortege was followed by huge crowds along the streets of Sydney to Central Station. 

The mourners behind the cortege were so dense that one eye-witness said, “You could have walked on their heads like a sheepdog over a mob of woollies.”

Flanking them down Oxford Street as they proceeded, the people stood 20 deep just to see the body go by, and the rooftops were lined with the people of Sydney, silent sentinels against the sky.

It was estimated that a quarter of a million people lined the procession.

Finally, home to Maitland, for the funeral proper. Sunday morning dawned bright and clear, a perfect ­winter’s morning, and the tiny country town soon found itself under a siege of sympathy. 

For they came from all corners ... in cars, on bikes, horse-drawn carriages and special trains from Sydney, Newcastle and the surrounding ­coalfields that were groaning with grievers.

Setting off at 3pm, as the shadows of the wintry day were just beginning to lengthen, the cortege had a procession two miles long behind it.

A moment now, as the coffin-­bearers steady their cargo above the yawning cavity of mother earth. To the side, faint with misery, Winnie stood weeping, supported by the O’Sullivan clan.

West Maitland the Very Reverend Father F O’Gorman, speaks: “If I were to ask this vast multitude, and my voice could reach all, the question ‘Are you glad the remains of Les Darcy have been brought home to the land of his birth, to be clasped in her breast?’ every hand, I feel sure, would go up in affirmation ... 

“We Catholics are proud of Les Darcy, and never have we been prouder of him than today ... Before the grave closes over him, in his name, we can forgive his enemies ... Had he gone on and reached the success he was ­striving after, he might never have realised what we knew him to be. 

“All that is left to say is Requiem aetermum, to one of the noblest sons Australia has ever produced ...”

It was the great writer D’Arcy Niland who identified that there was something more here than just a funeral.

“I don’t think all those hundreds of thousands of people, millions really, were mourning for Les alone,” he wrote. “Somewhere in the air was a vast silent lament for all the dead and ruined boys, the generation that had gone away laughing and singing and just vanished into thin air. 

“In some mysterious way he was one of them, not a soldier but a battler, someone who did his best, came a cropper and didn’t whinge about it.”

Is there something of the last in our mourning for Phillip Hughes?

 He lived the common Australian dream of wear the baggy green, was dropped five times, and yet never whinged. He was about to get it again, when a one-in-10 million tragedy took his life.

Vale Phillip Hughes.

Twitter: @Peter_Fitz