Just a couple of days without some kind of global emergency to lose sleep over would go down quite well at this point, wouldn’t it? Even five or 10 minutes, actually, without the nature of the world as we know it coming under some form of existential threat, would feel like a bonus.In the meantime, I guess there’s the familiar comfort of football to cling to, as there has been practically throughout these extraordinary and somehow increasingly crazy past two years. But even football, owing to design faults deep in its mechanism, and not limited to VAR, lets you down sometimes.And of course, I fully hear and appreciate the argument that true suffering puts starkly into perspective the tiny and in fact deeply privileged misery of losing a cup final on penalties to Liverpool. But I also know that, in a world in which true suffering is unfolding in real time on an unfathomable and depressing scale, losing a cup final on penalties to Liverpool doesn’t do much to cheer a person up, either.As the timeless line from ‘This is Spinal Tap’ goes: too much perspective.But before the match at Wembley, of course, for the spectators in the ground, came the more important business of standing solidly and loudly with Ukraine – a peace demonstration and display of kinship which it was moving to witness and, I hope, especially so for the Ukrainian friend of our family to whom I gave my ticket. People say that politics should be kept out of sport, but I’m not sure that it’s actually possible to do that, and on days like Sunday, when a football crowd is doing what football crowds can do, I don’t know why anybody would even want to.

But, of course, a football match followed, and then some extra time, and then a penalty shoot-out in which things ultimately went pear-shaped, though only after a protracted agony in which 20 penalties had been struck without error. And hats off especially, by the way, to Jorginho, Antonio Rudiger, N’Golo Kante, Timo Werner and Trevoh Chalobah, all of who, thanks to the toss of the coin, earned additional kudos for facing down the additional pressure of the sudden death phase.But, of course, somebody had to miss eventually. Somebody always does. Now, obviously, when you step back and look at it coldly, it’s fairly remarkable that you can lose a whole trophy because a goalkeeper (whose job, by definition, this is not) blows a shot at goal, and you might reasonably wonder where the general dignity of the game might be at such a moment.On the other hand, this could also be deemed part of the great service provided by the penalty shoot-out format. Win it (and we’ll be thinking of Munich in 2012) and you know the pleasure of emerging victorious from one the most dramatic sporting ordeals that humans have ever devised. Lose it, on the other hand (and here I’m thinking of last Sunday), and you get to dismiss it as an utterly random and meaningless way to decide a football match, all the while knowing, deep in your soul, that you haven’t really been beaten, and eventually moving on proudly with your head held high.The penalty shoot-out: it’s football’s win-win.

Anyway, we’d already won a trophy in February and I guess you can’t be greedy. Watching the team lift the Club World Cup and thereby complete the set of available trophies was, without question, a joyous experience, not least for the happy scenes afterwards. And I have to say, the pleasure was only increased by all those Arsenal and Tottenham fans – Piers Morgan prominent among them - logging on to social media to tell us that we were all over-reacting and it didn’t actually mean anything. How would they be in a position to know, though? It was like having a 50-year-old virgin explain to you that sex is over-rated.You’ve got to feel for Harvey Vale, maybe. In any other month, that goal he scored against Blackpool in the FA Youth Cup would have swept the Goal of the Month competition on this website. And, of course, it may still do so when the final votes are in. But, in my personal assessment, Harvey has made the rookie error of scoring that goal in the same month that Cesar Azpilicueta was flicking one home off the inside of his opposing ankle against Plymouth Argyle in the fourth round of the FA Cup.

Really, as the standard punditry phrase has it: he’s got no business trying that from there, or anywhere else. And for a full-back… well, it was a rare instance, you could say, of the gamekeeper turning poacher. Of the gamekeeper turning Zola, even.The thing that stays in my mind, though, is the fact that he tried it again in the second half. And almost succeeded, too. Remarkable value from a player who has always, of course, provided high levels of it. What with that, and the superb psy-ops work that Cesar undertook ahead of Kai Havertz’s penalty in Abu Dhabi… Well, it was his month, really. We just lived in it.It’s quite the run of form that this team now takes into March. Because losses on penalties are, quite correctly, recorded as draws, Sunday’s final was the seventh consecutive game undefeated in all competitions, and last night’s FA Cup win at Luton made it eight. Meanwhile, our win over Lille in the Champions League the week before it was our 16th consecutive undefeated game at the Bridge.

And on top of this, as I will not be the first to point out, our new status as Champions of the World ensures a nice new gold badge for the shirt going forward, and also means we now qualify to represent Earth in the Interplanetary Cup. Looking forward to it. As Sunday’s performance amply demonstrated, there is no side we need to fear out there. What have you got, Mercury? How about you, Venus?As long as our own world survives, of course. But it won’t be football’s fault if it doesn’t.