For a few minutes towards the end of a game which was remarkably open considering what was at stake, Northampton had one boot in National League One when Worcester's No8 Drew Hickey's barnstorming run gave his side the lead and Harlequins were still leading Sale.
As Worcester celebrated at the final whistle, Northampton's players stood forlorn, not knowing the cost of their 14th league defeat of the season. The Saints' owner Keith Barwell sat in the dressing room for four long minutes, waiting to be told the result from the Stoop. One man's relief was another's despair.
The battle at Sixways was part of a relegation denouement which could have gone five ways. Worcester, to their credit, did not delight in Harlequins' misfortune. Their head coach Andy Keast and captain Pat Sanderson, who had once been employed at the Stoop, stayed away from the after-match press conference.
It was a player Harlequins had released who had set Worcester on their way. The scrum-half Matt Powell scored his side's first try with a dummy and a hand-off from a five-yard scrum before creating the second with a surging run and clever pass.
An hour after the match the Worcester owner Cecil Duckworth sat in a bar, surrounded by happy backslappers. The businessman, whose largesse has transformed the Warriors from obscurity into a club capable of being a force in the Premiership, did not gloat.
He had maintained his integrity during Worcester's first season in the top division, refusing to sign up to an attempt to ring-fence the Premiership even though the club were striving for survival from the opening day. "It would have been immoral," he said. "There have been attempts to ring-fence by stealth and that cannot be justified. By surviving in the Premiership we have shown every club in the first division what is possible.
"I feel for Harlequins," added Duckworth, who has plans to increase the Sixways capacity to 15,000 in three years. "It could have been us and we had made contingency plans."
Northampton are former Heineken Cup winners but their glass has been empty most of the season. Nine consecutive defeats in the first half of the campaign left them adrift at the bottom, but the replacement of the head coach Alan Solomons by Budge Pountney five months ago proved their salvation.
The Saints team that took the field at Worcester was not the one announced by Pountney: Shane Drahm, who will be at Sixways next season, Tom Smith and Andrew Blowers all played having supposedly been injured. Northampton will struggle again next season unless they can increase the pace of their game; the arrival of the New Zealand fly-half Carlos Spencer should help.
Pountney took off Drahm five minutes from the end so that the fly-half was not put in the position of having to attempt a kick to condemn his future employers to relegation.
Bruce Reihana and Blowers apart, Northampton lacked class. The real battle has only just begun for Pountney.
Worcester: Delport; Pieters, Rasmussen, Lombard, Hinshelwood; Brown (Hayes, 70), Powell; Windo, Van Niekerk (Daly, 74), Lyman, Murphy, Gillies, Vaili (Mason, 70), Sanderson (capt), Hickey.
Tries: Powell, Rasmussen, Hickey. Cons: Brown 2, Hayes.
Northampton: Reihana; Rudd, Cohen, Stcherbina, Diggin; Drahm (Grayson, 80), Fulton; Smith, Thompson (capt; Richmond, 80), Sturgess (Emms, 75), Boome (Browne, 15), Lord, Fox (Soden, 76), Krige, Blowers.
Try: Diggin. Con: Drahm. Pens: Drahm 3, Grayson.
Referee: C White (Cheltenham).
Attendance: 8,477.
