Yes, Mathieu Flamini actually scored 2 great goals against Spurs. Seriously.

Most of the time, not watching football is a fairly straightforward business. Check the scores on your phone every half an hour or so, and generally the teams that should be winning will be winning, and the goals will been scored by the players that should be scoring. That’s why the bookies don’t go out of business, and that’s why football, even though it feels chaotic in the moment, is largely predictable.

Sometimes, though, something weird happens.

Your first instinct is, obviously, that somebody has made a mistake. Somewhere along the chain between the ground and your eyes, something’s broken. Maybe it’s you. Maybe there’s a smudge on your glasses. Maybe you were up late last night mainlining cheese -- The blue stuff. The good stuff -- and this is all some hideous fever dream, and Flamini’s going to score a third before climbing out of the phone dressed as a dinosaur and licking you all over your face. The UK had to spend all last week dealing with the revelation that their Prime Minister had, when young and very much allegedly, done something obscene to a dead pig’s head. Credulousness was already being stretched.

But then life continues in a normal fashion. Your face stays resolutely unlicked, the phone continues to insist that “Flamini 26” is a thing that happened and “78” is another thing that happened. Eventually, as reality obstinately refuses to adjust to your understanding of what can and cannot be, the onus to adjust falls on you. You have to acknowledge, to yourself, that Flamini scored twice in a proper game of football. You have to come to terms with this.

It’s a profoundly discombobulating moment. Yet also, upon reflection, a liberating one. Extremely peculiar occurrences can be scary, but they can also represent an opportunity to cast off the heavy existential burden that reality imposes. We all woke up in a world where Mathieu Flamini scored twice. In such a world, you could do anything. Get that novel done. Call up the secret love of your life and see if they fancy that coffee. Get up out of your chair, take off all of your clothes, walk out the door and let the autumn sunshine flood your skin like syrup.

(For a more intellectually robust and enjoyably obscene account of this phenomenon, do read this, on the philosophical implications of the Prosciutto Affair. Might not be safe for work.)

Obviously, SB Nation Soccer cannot be held responsible for any financial or legal consequences that might result from disrobing in your office. And there’s a nagging problem here: what if the goals were rubbish? What if one was a scuffed tap-in and the other an undercooked backpass? Sure, it would still be funny that Flamini got them both, but it would be like finding out that Cameron had merely spent a few minutes pillocking about with a ham sandwich. The grandiosity of the moment would be gone. The import would be lost. The brutalizing weight of reality would still obtain.

Where the idea of something is so wonderful, the actual reality of it is almost certain to disappoint. Presumably Cameron’s alleged fellow diners were far less amused than those of us who were lucky enough not to be invited to his alleged party. And perhaps the only way to truly enjoy Flamini’s goals -- apart from being an Arsenal fan, which is a whole other category of existential agony -- is to never actually see them at all. To remain ignorant and innocent, to refuse to allow the mundane facts of the matter to pollute the beautiful fictions.

In the head, they are anything you want them to be, and as such, so are you. On the screen, chances are, they’d just be a perfectly decent footballer diverting a ball into a net, and the world would still be what it was. Sometimes, the best way to watch football is not to watch football at all.

Gave in. Watched them. Caught that volley lovely, hey? What a beautiful day.