Happy that his team safely negotiated the 107 steps to collect the trophy on Saturday, columnist Giles Smith is clearing his mind for the summer.

Here's what would have spoiled the end of the season for me: losing to Everton in the FA Cup final.

I can see how that may sound like a fairly obvious thing to say. Losing in the FA Cup final has never been known to get too many parties started - or not the kind of parties you'd want to be at, anyway.

I don't, for instance, remember the journey back from Cardiff, after the defeat to Arsenal in 2002, being remarkable for an outbreak of paper hats, party poppers and slices of novelty cake on brightly coloured plates.

On the contrary, I seem to remember spending that journey staring silently out of a train window, in the company of a lot of other people, staring silently out of other train windows.

Similarly, in 1994, after the 4-0 defeat by Manchester United, there was, as I recall, precious little singing 'YMCA' and forming conga lines all the way back to Wembley Central. There was just a lot of trudging through the rain.

(The heavens opened that afternoon, as if the gods themselves were made miserable by what they witnessed. Which, of course, the gods were, having backed Chelsea at a very reasonable 5/4, and having been gutted when Gavin Peacock hit the bar at 0-0 in the first half.)

But the case for not losing was unusually urgent this time, wasn't it? The context dictated as much. There were things that winning the FA Cup was meant to sort out for us - important things, things that were carried over from the rest of the season and would shape our attitude, going forward. With the result that winning the FA Cup last Saturday was never going to be about just winning the FA Cup.

For one thing, it was going to atone in part for the massive misfortune of the Champions League semi-final. Of all the things that came to pass last season, that was, without question, the hardest to swallow. And it got no easier to swallow a week ago, when the Premier League's representatives in the final fell so far short of the task in hand that it was embarrassing to witness.

Actually, I quite enjoyed that aspect of it. But anyway.

The other thing the FA Cup final was pre-required to produce was a gigantic and properly grateful send-off for Mr Hiddink. And I think everyone would have agreed from the outset that the necessary grandeur and tender sentiment of the occasion would not have been served by the sight of him staggering up 14 miles of steps to be handed a small box with a loser's medal inside it.

Two issues here, by the way: firstly, what happened to hanging the medals around the players' and managers' necks? Once upon a time, everyone had to bow solemnly and be properly crowned with their due reward. Nowadays the medals come pre-packaged in dinky black boxes and are handed out like sandwiches. I suspect health and safety has got something to do with it, but I would love to be proved wrong.

Secondly, having spent so much time and money planning the National Stadium, couldn't they have made access to the royal box from the pitch just a little bit simpler - like with a smaller staircase or a lift or something?

The players climb the stairs, disappear down a hole, walk along a corridor, go up some more stairs out of sight, reappear about a quarter of an hour later in another hole, work their way along a thin gantry… it's all phenomenally complicated and tempts a re-enactment of the classic moment in the movie 'This is Spinal Tap!' when the band get lost on the way from the dressing room to the stage.

One day at Wembley, a team will go up to receive its losers' medals and never be seen again - just see if I'm wrong. And let's hope it's Tottenham.

But, getting back to the point here - winning the FA Cup last Saturday was merely part of a far bigger end-of-season agenda. It was a massive tying-up of loose ends. And therefore losing it would have been spectacularly awful.

Defeat never has much to recommend it, but last weekend it had absolutely nothing. It would have left a very bad smell indeed - a smell that would quite possibly have taken the whole of the summer to clear.

But, of course, it all turned out okay - as we sort of knew it would, didn't we? Even when Everton took that shockingly early lead, it was hard to panic. You simply paused, briefly, to lament the taking of Roberto Di Matteo's record and moved on. Somehow you trusted the team to play itself out of trouble.

For, in the end, the story simply demanded that Mr Hiddink end the afternoon holding the trophy and, a little bit later, a fat cigar. The players knew this and, accordingly, they did the necessary work and brought it to pass.

So, now a break. And then a new season under a new manager. Some people have asked me, 'What do you think?' Well, I'm doing my best not to think anything at this stage, actually. Which is pretty hard, but I'm trying.

This is because I thought an awful lot of things this time a year ago, when Mr Scolari was appointed. And almost none of the things I thought at that point turned out to be correct, or even anywhere near half-true. So, on those grounds, the best thing for me this time around would seem to be a period of silence, a period of waiting and seeing.

Or, as some people refer to it, 'the summer'.