THERE CAN BE FEW WHO WITNESSED the mounting agonies of the 20,000-plus people trapped inside the New Orleans Superdome last week that did not subsequently offer up a silent vow never to complain about anything ever again. Yet there was one brief sight amid the otherwise thoroughly distressing news coverage from within this airtight hell-hole that momentarily must have raised the spirits of all who saw it.

Incredibly, despite the overwhelming misery, the naked fear, the catastrophic squalor, the lack of food and water and temperatures routinely topping the 100-degree mark, teams of men had got together and organised a football tournament.

Even as thousands more ragged, hollow-eyed refugees poured into the arena, taking the numbers far above capacity and putting space at a premium, you could see that a sizeable area was still being allocated just to this game. I’m not sure what type of person it is who, on learning that the most terrifying force in nature is headed straight for them, packs a football before abandoning the house, but plainly such idiosyncratic thinking is much welcomed by the masses, even in their direst hours.

It’s a racing certainty, too, that for every man involved in the match on the AstroTurf, there were hundreds more looking on from the endless, fetid stands, all trying to work up the nerve to turn to their traumatised loved ones and say: “Look, will you be OK for half an hour, I think I’m going to have a bit of that myself . . .”

It may be a dark and uneasy observation, but there it is. It is the sort of remarkable evidence glimpsed in New Orleans last week that we may use to confound those sport-hating misfits who believe “it’s only a game”. You know, like sex is only a habit.

Indeed, when Danny Kelly and I hosted phone-in shows for a constantly nervous BBC, the extreme circumstances under which sport can and will continue was a regular and never less than astonishing strand. The case I am about to document I only truly believed when a newspaper cutting relating to its central theme was furnished a few weeks after the call’s airing. Here goes, and I warn you it’s not pretty.

It happened that a man called Steve was playing for his Sunday side on a clear-blue-sky morning in Eltham, South London. The game was between bitter rivals and was about 20 minutes old, with the score 0-0, when the bellowing of the players and the peep of the referee’s whistle were suddenly drowned out by a harsh, metallic grinding. Looking up, they saw a light aircraft clearly in some difficulty. After making several looping circuits of the park, the plane’s engine cut out altogether and it began helplessly twirling to earth like a sycamore seed.

During its dreadful descent, everything fell quiet and nobody moved a muscle, all save a forward from Steve’s team, who happened to have the ball at his feet just a few yards outside the area. Although he, too, was thunderstruck by the awful events about to climax within yards of his muddy boots, he still had enough about him simultaneously to perceive that all other players were now as statues and that a clear, broad avenue had opened up between him and the goal.

Perhaps it is helpful at this point to understand that Steve’s team hadn’t beaten this much-loathed opposition in six years of trying. Almost without thinking and, to be fair, playing strictly to the whistle, he firmly side-footed the ball home. At about the same instant, the ailing plane thudded to earth about 100 metres away before careering crazily across the grass and coming to rest “virtually on the corner flag” at the end that hadn’t just conceded.

Those bold enough to run towards the wreck rather than away could instantly see that both the occupants were dead (I warned you it wasn’t pretty). Over the next hour, emergency services arrived and went, statements were taken and the wreckage of the plane was taped off, awaiting removal. The teams, meanwhile, sprawled in understandable shock on the grass.

When the last of the police had driven away and talk, traffic and birdsong ushered in normalcy to the park once more, somebody — Steve says he doesn’t remember who — asked what was going to happen now about the match. The following exchanges went something like this:

“Well, I reckon we should meet up midweek and start it again.”

“What, at 1-0 you mean?”