Just as everything was apparently better way back when, it seems it was crazier; madder; more exciting, unpredictable and arbitrary too.

And when you hear the story of the Uruguayan captain, Obdulio Varela laying pictures of their Brazilian opponents on the dressing floor and inviting his teammates to urinate on them before the 1950 World cup Final as a motivational tool (that hasn’t really stood the test of time), you can probably concede to the older generation that maybe things were different in the good ol’ days.

But while that was pretty off the wall the last time the World Cup was in Brazil 50 years ago, I don’t recall ever hearing of a thrice offending (near) cannibalistic footballer strutting his stuff then. Imagine how incredulously young fellas are going to look at you in 50 years’ time when you swear that happened.

Oh and guess what young man, the most successful club of the last decade then went and spent £75m to buy him, even though he wasn’t allowed kick a football for four months. After the people of Amsterdam, Liverpool and Natal getting front row seats, the Catalans weren’t going to be peering through TV screens and scanning endlessly looping Vines (whatever they were) like plebs, no, they were paying top dollar to see Round 4 of Suarez’s mighty meat show up close and personal.

It just goes to show we’re adaptable and move on quickly; there’s not much truly jolts our systems – at least not immediately. Consequently, it can take a little time for the full scale of events to register with us by which time they’re a point in time ever receding out of view of our rear-view mirrors but hurtling towards the realms of nostalgia where finally greatness, madness or absurdity can be properly attributed to them.

This World Cup offered up some of the most unlikely and unbelievable moments ever – both on and off the pitch.

In addition to the star with a proclivity for sinking his teeth into people there was the Argentinian coach’s somewhat farcical yet brilliant reaction to his striker hitting the bar where he nearly went horizontal; we had the endless Twitter speculation as to whether or not a certain Irish co-commentator had the trots (get well soon, Ray); the physio who broke his ankle; the pretty Belgian girl that got a modelling contract having been picked out in the crowd (before being fired after pictures of her posing beside slaughtered antelope emerged); and not forgetting of course the Colombian Nazi Weed Pope that graced our screens and the African head of state who was forced to load $3m of his finest US dollars onto a plane and fly it all the way to Brazil just to appease the nation’s footballers.

And that’s just the small stuff.

Of greater importance and deserving of even further incredulity was the comprehensive defeat of the reigning World and two-time European champions, Spain at the hands of the Netherlands; the dependence of the world’s greatest football nation on a 22-year-old and the subsequent national mourning that accompanied his premature exit from the tournament; the stellar performances of unfancied teams like Greece and Costa Rica, the USA, Chile and Algeria that made this tournament one of the best in living memory; and the greatest shock in the history of the World Cup when the hosts and pre-tournament favourites were disembowelled by Germany in front of 58,000 fans.

The gut-wrenching evisceration of a nation’s psyche that accompanied that last one was tough to observe from afar and impossible to fully comprehend without having been in the country at the time and crucially, being of that country. And the shame, it has to be said, much greater than the previous most shameful moment in their sporting history – that defeat to Uruguay in the Maracana in 1950.

While Suarez’s bite and Brazil’s defeat might have breached the divide of what can shock us, the absurdity of many of the other goings-on will probably have to be doused in nostalgia and pored over through rose-tinted spectacles before being properly appreciated, it’s the way we seem to work and what continuously makes the good ol’ times the best of all.