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It was the silence that did it. A nanosecond of silence between his first touch which killed the ball and his second touch that stroked it into the left hand corner of the Leeds goal. The silence was white noise, a breathless gasp as a perfectly written script played itself out on a cold Monday evening in January. Soon it gave way to a vociferous roar that sent audible fireworks crackling into the North London sky. Back on the pitch, pandemonium. Thierry Henry is beside himself. He’s primal, visceral, pounding his chest, his heart, his body now a slave to adrenaline and emotion. And we remember. We remember why it is we love this game. Why it is we toil with the insipid mundanity, the sickening partisan hatred, the monotonous controversy. It’s for moments like this one.

When explaining to a non-believer why we give a large portion of our lives to football it’s often hard to find the words. Football is, of course, a visual game. One which can’t be translated onto the page without losing some of its rawness. The arguments against football are endless; How can we watch twenty-two men chasing a ball for ninety minutes? How can we pay footballers hundreds of thousands of pounds a week for that? Where is the fun in standing in the rain for ninety-minutes watching a 0-0 draw?

And there’s not much we can say in our defense. We can try to stumble through a riposte, try to rationalize the obsession, but it all ends up sounding like the misguided ramblings of a mad man. So instead we just shut up and on Saturday morning we wake up once more, hopeful that today is the day our team does something that vindicates us.

As fans of a team we are patient. We wade through perpetual mediocrity and disappointment. We are always waiting. Waiting for our next fix, waiting for the next time something happens that stirs redolent thoughts of childhood, of being bereft of cynicism and the darkness that swells around the game all too often. After months of hearing about Luis Suarez, John Terry and the one-eyed tribalism that inspires myopic hatred, we need moments like last night.

Remember David Beckham’s free-kick versus Greece? Solskjear’s last-minute winner against Bayern Munich? Stan Collymore scoring the fourth goal against Newcastle? Michael Thomas charging through on goal at Anfield? How about Wembley in 1966? These are the reasons we watch football and the rarity of them are the reason they are special.

Football, you see, is a leveler. In its purest form it encapsulates everything good and bad about the human condition. During ninety minutes we are hopeful, nervous, angry, insulting, cruel, disappointed, hurt, bemused, excited, thrilled. And at its most powerful we are heartbroken, crushed, awed, and ecstatic. We are all these things, but we are never detached. We are alive. We are existing at a heightened level of feeling. Not many things in life can provide you with experiences so rich with colour and this is why we come back for more. It’s easy to stand in the rain on a cold Saturday afternoon watching a 0-0 draw play itself out before your eyes if you retain the hope that next week something might happen, that something glorious is coming soon.

So we wait. And people tell us it’s just a game and that it doesn’t matter. But we know it does matter.

Anything that produces such highs and such lows matters. It’s easy to get bogged down in the mud, to see footballers as overpaid, inarticulate buffoons. To see football itself as a business where fans are commodities and the game is a ##*@#. To see the hatred it inspires as something which outweighs anything else it can offer. But we carry on regardless. Because we know that one day soon it’ll be a cold Monday evening in January and Thierry Henry will return to the club he loves and score a 78th minute winner against Leeds. And it will matter.

Btw...