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The golden confetti has long since been cleared from Stadium Australia after Spain's historic win in the Women's World Cup final.
The record crowds, the quality of the football and the inspired run of the Matildas that united a nation are now just pleasant memories.
So what happens now?
Women's football in Australia is at a crossroads: the success of the Matildas and the World Cup has provided an enormous opportunity for growth; the test is how will the game capitalise on the goodwill that's been created?
The co-chief executive of the players' union, Kate Gill, said the Matildas had united and inspired the Australian public, particularly the next generation of young footballers.
As a result, A-Leagues boss Danny Townsend said women's football needed to take this opportunity to "supercharge" the growth of the game.
Despite the relative success of the Matildas, women's football has some big issues to grapple with: how to improve professionalism, pay and conditions for women in the A-League; how to improve conditions at the grassroots; and how to stop girls leaving the game at twice the rate of boys.
For Gill and Townsend, who represent the elite players and the elite competition, the key concern is growing and expanding the A-League Women competition, which lags markedly behind the men's in terms of pay, access to coaches and medical staff, and number of games.
"There needs to be funding at the professional level so that we can actually offer our very talented athletes professional careers, as we do for their male counterparts," Gill said.
The minimum salary for this year's competition of 12 teams, which begins on October 14, will be $25,000, but the average is expected to be only marginally higher.
"Our ask is that everyone else gets behind the women's game in more ways than they have up to now and that's all stakeholders, that's the government, that's the corporate sector and that's the public," Townsend said.
Both Townsend and Gill have welcomed the federal government's promise to spend $200 million on women's sport, but they argue football should be targeted and prioritised.
"I think like it's been a little bit misguided or a little big misplaced that there should be some funding available for the sport itself, and I also feel that needs to flow to the professional game as well in the A-League Women's competition," Gill said.
"It's football that has provided this moment and provided this opportunity, so we would like to see a significant amount of that being applied and allocated to football."
But what of the argument that the Matildas secured a fourth spot in the World Cup – better than some of the strong football nations like the USA and Germany — on existing funding, so why do they need more?
"When you look at those two nations, they've had significant allocation of funding poured into their programs and it's shown that they've become powerhouses and are leading the charge," Gill said.
"For us to come fourth off the back of, I'd say a significant lack of funding, is a testament to the players.
"I think it's also an indictment on the women's game that players need to be satisfied with just receiving scraps and perhaps, a piecemeal approach to it and in spite of that, they can still succeed.
"So imagine what would be possible if we actually resource them to the appropriate and requisite level."
Echoing the legendary Johnny Warren, Townsend said Australia's goal should be to win World Cups, not "settling" for fourth.
"I think that's certainly in the future for us if we continue to invest," he said, with an eye toward the Matildas' next World Cup campaign in 2027.
"How are we going to keep them competitive? How are we going to make a 12-year-old female aspiring athlete get the same opportunities as a 12-year-old boy?"
He said some of that government money should be used to fund pathways into professionalism.
"At the moment there isn't a pathway for a 12-year-old girl into the A-League, that's a pathway that exists for a 12-year-old boy," he said.
"What we do know is all the other countries around the world are spending money significantly in building the development pathway for their female athletes.
"We're not doing that because none of the legacy money that has been committed to our sport and other sports is going to the elite pathway for women footballers.
"Our plan is to build out the academy pathway across our A-League clubs all across the country and in New Zealand."
Concerns over putting young players onto elite pathways
But there is another view – one that runs diametrically opposite to Townsend's.
Thomas Engesser has been a junior football coach for 15 years. He's currently the Technical Director at the Marrickville Football Club in Sydney's inner west, where he runs development programs for the kids and coaches. He also coaches a junior girls team.
He is an advocate for children learning about the game and enjoying it so that it becomes a life-long passion.
"I look at the imminent connection kids have to games and to play — the joy that they get from just turning up and playing games," he said.
And while he said professional pathways are important so that girls can have something to aspire to, he is concerned about the potential harm that can be done by identifying elite talent at a young age.
"Doing that at an early age when we should be keeping these kids in the sport, basically just seeks to undermine the sport that we want these kids to be participating in," he said.
"Siphoning off these kids fractures these clubs like Marrickville."
Engesser said it is more valuable to keep children of all levels and abilities playing together at a club level to keep social connections and let the players develop together.
"Rather than 'as many as possible for as long as possible' – which many studies will tell you that's optimum for ensuring that we have excellence at the top end — we do the opposite," he said.
"We narrow the field at the first opportunity with talent ID and with financial constraints."
The financial constraints he's referring to are the fees of several thousand dollars, that many clubs charge to have players train at elite academies.
"The grassroots are really important," he said.
"We spend so much time in Australian sport looking at the top end. And every major event we have we always go 'this is the legacy that this will leave us'.
"In the end, it's really at the bottom that the volume of girls and boys who are playing their sport that really matters and keeping those kids in the game is what really matters."
How to encourage girls to stay in the sport?
It is particularly important if girls are going to stay in the game.
Figures compiled by the Australian Sports Commission's Ausplay survey since 2015 show between the ages of 15 and 25, girls and women drop out at twice the rate of boys and men.
Only one in four girls will keep playing into adulthood as opposed to one in two boys.
While Gill is critical of the federal government for not funding elite sport, she said its funding can make a difference to the grassroots.
"I feel that we're very facilities poor and most of the facilities that we do have at a community and grassroots level are equipped for males participating in the sport, they're not representative of what females need," she said.
She said funding the grassroots and creating "a place where they feel comfortable, safe included and welcome" can address the high drop-out rate.
Engesser agreed women and girls need access to better facilities and quality coaching in order to lift their overall competency in the game.
"If you believe you're good at something, that gives you that intrinsic motivation to keep doing this thing that you love to do," he said.
"The goal is to stay in sport — to see it as a life-long endeavour."
"If you're not going to become a professional player, you want to have something that you can say 'this is what I love to do — it's good for my health, it's good for my mental wellbeing'."
The coming A-League Women season will be a big test of whether the newly found love for women's football can be sustained.
Townsend hopes some of the people who went to a Matildas match for the first time during the World Cup will go to an A-League Women match, where hundreds of people often turn up rather than the tens of thousands seen at recent Matildas matches.
"We're coming off a low base, sadly, and I think that's the message that we want to get out there," he said.
"Everyone's enjoyed the euphoria of a World Cup, but unless fans come out and support the domestic game here and get the commercial cogs turning, our ability to continue to surface Matildas at the level we have is going to be compromised."
Australia is a hugely competitive sporting market and getting those commercial interests behind women's football will be a challenge.
The new A-League season will be played at the same time as the AFLW, the cricket season for men and women, and the international tennis summer, to name just a few of football's major competitors.
But Townsend said the World Cup proved the interest is there.
"We've shown that we're a football nation now," he said.
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