The sound system was up at Spinal Tap 11 level, the commentary was…excitable.

It was three years since this meeting had been able to be staged in the Moroccan capital and while there were sections of the arena left empty, the main stands near the finish and those around the top and bottom bends were full of fans demonstrably enjoying the prospect which lay before them.

Inevitably the concluding men’s 3,000 metres steeplechase, involving local hero Soufiane El Bakkali, whose gold medal at last summer’s Tokyo 2020 Games was the only medal earned by Morocco in those Olympics, was the promised treat at the end of the evening.

The field in Rabat was something of a patchwork. Some of the events lacked a depth of quality, but as one would expect from the sport’s main regular showcase, many of the best of the best were in attendance.

Jamaica’s double Olympic 100m and 200m champion Elaine Thompson-Herah, despite admitting in a relaxed press conference appearance on the previous day that she was not in "top shape", won the women’s 100m smoothly and efficiently in 10.83sec - a meeting record she had been happy to predict.

Greece’s Olympic long jump champion Miltiadis Tentoglou, rangy and hungry for more success despite the world indoor gold he has already added to his collection this year, delivered on the pledge he had made with a wolfish grin the day before by upholding "the pride of the long jump" with victory over the startlingly talented Swiss decathlete Simon Ehammer whose 8.45m effort at the Gotzis multi-events meeting had established him atop the season’s world rankings in that discipline.

As it happens, the word is that Ehammer will attempt to double up with long jump and decathlon at next month’s World Athletics Championships in Oregon, where the timetable will be helpful to such an enterprise.

The men’s 800m, meanwhile, contained Kenya’s respective Tokyo 2020 gold and silver medallists, Emmanuel Korir and Ferguson Rotich - although these two finished well down the order as the latest startling talent from their country, 17-year-old world under-20 champion Emmanuel Wanyonyi kept his place, and his cool, before accelerating at the ideal moment to claim a victory that he afterwards described as "quite easy".

As you might expect, he will be going to Eugene not for experience, but gold…

But this was a meeting that will be remembered, passionately so in the host country, for the astonishing drama of its two concluding track races, which encompassed both sides of this sporting life as far as Olympic champions Karsten Warholm and Soufiane El Bakkali were concerned.

For Warholm, the victor ludorum in Tokyo thanks to victory in the greatest men’s 400m hurdles race ever seen, becoming the first and so far only man to better 46 seconds in the process, last night’s race was a long-anticipated debut to a season that stretched in front of him like so much untrodden snow in his native Ulsteinvik.

At the pre-event press conference he had assessed his position thus: "Everything that I can win in 400m hurdles I’ve won and all the records I’ve taken. Now we go back to the reason why I started doing this in the beginning. Now it’s all about seeing how good I can become.

"I think I am entering a new part of my career, because now there’s very big expectations on me, and for me to be living up to them - the journey starts here in Rabat."

As he stuttered to a halt after the first hurdle, clutching his right hamstring, that journey suddenly became more complex and concerning. He spoke afterwards of it being "a cramp", although other sources quoted him as referring to "a tear".

Warholm has come through adversity before. As 2017 world champion he spent the following season running faster and faster and still getting beaten by Qatar’s newly emerged Abderrahman Samba, never dodging him, before emerging again as the leader of the pack.

Asked about how he had been preparing and training rather than competing on the indoor circuit, he described the routine he and his longtime coach, Leif Olav Alnes, have long established: "We actually like the work in silence part - that’s where we feel like it’s us against the rest."

That territory will shortly be revisited.

Once Warholm had made his slow and thoughtful exit, the tumult in the stadium rose. As the field gathered for the concluding men’s 3,000m steeplechase, which pitted El Bakkali once again against the Ethiopian who took silver behind him in Tokyo, Lamecha Girma, the already considerable noise level rose still higher.

Morocco’s golden champion of the Tokyo 2020 Olympics played cat to his Ethiopian rival’s mouse, pouncing on the back straight and coming home in a meeting record and season's world best of 7min 58.28sec.

As he approached the line, and crossed it, the stadium pulsated with noise and excitement. On the other side of the section to the press area, men, women, children, smartphones in hand, were jumping up and down in excitement.

The air buzzed and reverberated. And the thought occurred that, for all the gaps in some of the fields, this meeting had delivered the most precious kind of moment that sport can bring.

Next up in the Diamond League - Rome. Where joint Olympic high jump champion Gianmarco Tamberi stands ready to produce a similarly energising effect...