It all started with a bottle of brandy and an evening of shooting the breeze, as Rachael Heyhoe Flint and Jack Hayward, the chairman of Wolverhampton Wanderers, hatched a very cunning plan.
It culminated, at Edgbaston on July 28, 1973, with Heyhoe Flint's England being crowned as the inaugural Cricket World Cup winners, a full two years before Clive Lloyd's West Indians became the first men's team to latch onto this very good idea, and run with it.
Women's cricket has always required such a trailblazing edge. Getting noticed has been the least of it - simply getting a chance to compete on their own terms (never mind equal terms) has been the prerequisite for most of the sport's history.
That narrative returns to Edgbaston on Friday, for England versus Sri Lanka in the opening match of this home T20 World Cup, but the days of the players handing out their own flyers to drum up interest will be a thing of the dim and distant past. With ticket sales for this tournament already past the 150,000 mark, a sense of unstoppable momentum has finally taken hold of the sport.
Not necessarily for the England team themselves, mind you, who - auspiciously but also ominously - have never yet failed to win a Women's World Cup (T20 or otherwise) on home soil, and who must contend with the added expectation that their football and rugby counterparts have created with their own successes in recent times.
But, for the global game as a whole, the positioning of this tournament could hardly be more perfect. It's a homecoming in every sense - a return to the country where it all began, but also a chance to allow the enormous advances of the past few years to bed down in an environment that truly can be guaranteed to embrace them.
It's not that women's cricket is a stranger to hitting the heights any more. In March 2020, a staggering crowd of 86,174 gathered at the MCG to witness Australia's fifth T20 World Cup title in seven attempts, and prove that the sport, five seasons on from the launch of the WBBL, was finally capable of standalone status.
That sense was redoubled at the most recent global gathering, at Navi Mumbai in November, where India's maiden triumph in the 50-over World Cup brought with it the acclaim and attention of the biggest market in the game.
That cart had been put before its horse two years earlier, with the establishment of the WPL and the life-changing sums of money that the game's best players were suddenly able to command. But to judge by the scores of Smriti Mandhana replica shirts during the recent IPL, name recognition has now entered the chat.
For a version of the sport that is open to more than 50% of the global population, that final fact constitutes the ultimate game-changer. But, crucially, the tournament organisers will be under no illusions that the game has indeed changed since the last time England hosted a global tournament, in that heady summer of 2017.
There are lessons from history to be learnt in that regard. Back in 1999, when the men's World Cup returned to England for the first time in 16 years, it encountered a host nation that failed to recognise how much the tournament had grown in the interim. Two stagings in the subcontinent, in 1987 and 1996, wrapped around a groundbreaking trip to Australia in 1992 where coloured clothing and floodlights finally took hold, had transformed its parameters to the point that there was no looking back.
There's no danger of the same mistake being made twice. England's women made sure of that nine years ago, with their stunning victory over India in the 2017 final. And yet, it's still worth considering just how stunned the ECB was by its immense good fortune at that event.
The thrill of a capacity crowd at Lord's - a venue that, barely two decades earlier, still hadn't allowed women into the Long Room - was only a part of the story. When Tom Harrison, the then-ECB chief executive, went on to describe that tournament as the most "disruptive" event in England's cricket history, he did so with the wide-eyed astonishment of a tech bro who'd just been handed a prototype iPhone.
Right up until the moment that Anya Shrubsole swiped the final from under India's noses, the board had been ready to wrap it all up with a highlights montage, and get back to the summer's main event, England men's ongoing Test series against South Africa.
Instead, and genuinely not that indirectly, the sudden expansion of cricket's footprint across genders emboldened the ECB to draw up plans for the innovative new city-based, family-oriented competition that would soon become known as the Hundred.
Even then, it would take a further accident of timing, this time the onset of Covid, for the original plans for a shadow women's event at non-Test grounds to be scrapped in favour of the familiar double-headers. And yet, all through the secretive months of planning that went into the big reveal, Heather Knight, the women's captain, had been one of just three active players - alongside Eoin Morgan, the men's captain, and Daryl Mitchell of the PCA - to be privy to the evolving details.
The sense of cricket paying lip service to the women's game is still never that far from the surface. In 2023, the sport in this country was castigated by the Independent Commission for Equity in Cricket (ICEC) report, which found myriad failings on grounds of class, race and gender. Even now, with more than 150 professional women's players in England and Wales, compared to the paltry figure of 18 in 2017, the report's recommendation of equal pay at domestic level by 2029 and international level by 2030 remains a pipe-dream.
Until, that is, this tournament has been and gone, and the sport finds itself having to reassess, yet again, the true value of women's cricket.
The ambitions for the coming month will be big and bold, as befits the lessons that England's men finally learned for their staging of the 50-over World Cup in 2019. Leaving aside the final to end all finals, the most magnificent aspect of that event was the blanket support for every team in the draw, as multicultural Britain came out in droves to lean into their respective heritages.
In truth, it had been the saving grace of the 1999 event too, even though the hosts failed to appreciate it back then, amid the misery of their early exit. But, leaving aside the obvious desire for a talented-but-fallible England team to go significantly deeper this time around, it surely will not be a disaster if they do not.
The timing of this tournament might, on the one hand, feel awry with a different, rather larger World Cup taking place across the pond in the Americas. And yet, the chance for women's cricket to stand proudly on its own, in a sympathetic timezone, and hoover up the good vibes from what promises to be a joyous gathering of nations to a common passion, already feels as though it'll be distinctly at odds with the spiteful mood that is emanating from FIFA's World Cup.
How ironic is it, too, that the build-up has been so overshadowed by the latest chaotic exploits of England's men. Once more, it's not an uncommon theme.
In 1993, England's second home World Cup victory, this time against New Zealand at Lord's, landed in the British summer with what, back then, was a disproportionate (but instructive) splash.
That tournament had needed a last-minute cash injection to get underway at all, but then, entirely out of the blue, the final was broadcast live on Grandstand. Their ludicrous (and unlamented) stiff skirts notwithstanding, the exploits of Jo Chamberlain, Karen Smithies et al came as a welcome distraction from yet another disastrous Ashes summer. Just four days beforehand, Graham Gooch had fallen on his sword and resigned as the men's Test captain.
And even in the moment of victory, at Lord's in 2009, Charlotte Edwards, England's then-captain and now head coach, was asked on the winner's podium how it felt to have landed a world title that (at that stage) continued to elude the men. She winced and insisted she'd rather talk about her girls and their achievements than continue to be judged against their male counterparts.
This might just be the moment that comparisons fall away, for a tournament that is ready to be embraced as the one true focus of this English summer.