Great entertainment at Wembley Stadium, where the Green Dolphin Synthesisers were narrowly overturned by the Punxatawney Cheesesniffers, running quartermaster Merv Huckleberry finding Jamahl Guacamole in Homebase in the dying seconds of supra-mandatory overtime. Go, Sniffers!

OK, so I’m not quite up on some of the technical details here. But give me a chance. This was only the second time that the NFL has come to London for a fully fledged, in-season American football game, and it’s going to take some of us a while to achieve an easy fluency with the essentials.

Meanwhile, even the ignorant observer can see how, with repetition, this annual event could eventually become, at the very least, a cherished horticultural tradition, in which some 80 or so vast Americans in helmets descend and, in the wake of a spectacular rainfall, rip the turf off the Wembley surface, leaving scenes reminiscent of a flooded Sussex paddock after a weekend-long battle reenactment.

But hey, it’s only grass. Important distinction, though: American football aficionados don’t refer to a “pitch”, they refer to a “field”. And Wembley certainly looks like one by the time these people go home.

In the draw for a conveniently local training camp, the New Orleans Saints got Watford. Haven’t the people of that city suffered enough? Nevertheless, there were no shots of Watford that one noticed in CBS’s helpful, scene-setting cutaways, the American broadcaster preferring to kindle its viewers’ sense of that special Wembley atmosphere with postcard images of the London Eye and Big Ben.

Yet the spectacle remained American to the last cheerleader. The Star-Spangled Banner was sung by Ne-Yo, who did an immaculate job, although I won’t be the first to point out that the “bombs bursting in air” and “land of the free” stuff gives plenty for a Grammy award-winning recording artist and songwriter to get his teeth into.

The National Anthem of the United Kingdom, on the other hand . . . well, you can imagine the discussions that took place with the NFL beforehand.

“That song of yours – it’s a bit of a downer, we feel. That strange, low, droning noise? We envisage people back home phoning in to complain about sound interference. What if we got in someone who can kick it up a little bit – you know, bring some soul to the table, really save that queen?” So, enter Joss Stone – and I think we can categorically say that no one in the run-up to a sports event has called more soulfully for divine intervention on behalf of the reigning monarch. Oh my, was the Queen saved. Bending notes and adding syllables at a rate of about 73 per line, Stone clearly wanted Her Majesty to be sent victorious, happy and glorious, as usual – but like a sex machine. It was as bold a musical reinterpretation as one has witnessed anywhere. Also a leg-crossing embarrassment and a classic YouTube comedy clip in the making.

Otherwise, the lesson here was that one can devote serious hours to the study of American football (both in-season games at Wembley, eager viewings of the Super Bowl, dutiful sessions in front of the Sky Sports magazine programme), but it still might as well be Quidditch as far as basic explicability is concerned. Apparently, the Saints (or was it the San Diego Chargers? I’m staring into a broiling sea of baffled notes here) “led the league last year in takeaways”. Meaning what, though? I got the distinct impression that I led my street in takeaways in 2007 and 2006, but I didn’t think it was anything to boast about.

Meanwhile, at the back of one’s mind lurked the thought that one of these two teams (the Saints) had surrendered home advantage and that both of them had endured a bizarre bump in their season for the benefit of a brand-growing initiative. But as one of the CBS commentators dryly put it, “When the NFL talks, you listen.” It was reassuring to think that, if someone ever suggested something similar for English league football, they would be laughed into oblivion.

What’s that? They did? And they were? But it still may happen anyway? Good grief.

In Hole in the Wall, BBC One’s teatime family vote-winner, two teams in coloured suits and helmets, one of them captained by Darren Gough, do their best not to get knocked over backwards by a moving wall. Which sounds like a strange way to carry on, but it makes a little more sense in the light of American football.

Anyway, the important thing is that, as the weeks go by, Gough takes more and more naturally to his role as a kind of Lycra-clad coconut in this polystyrene shy. “The Mega-Wall!” he shouts to Dale Winton, with apparently genuine enthusiasm. “Bring it on!” One feels that, even more than on Strictly Come Dancing, the former England pace man may have found his true post-cricket path.