We love a big number. All numbers that end in nought are good and if they are a recognisable part of a century, so much the better. In one sense the Munich air disaster matters every year, but naturally it has more resonance in our minds when it is attached to a big and resonant number. Fifty.

Fifty years since the plane crash that wiped out Manchester United’s golden youth; 50 years since the young men of incomparable talent — and they get better every year, every decade — were killed. The story has been retold again and again, as is right in a half-centenary. It has been a story of a mourning that, it seems, can never end, perhaps rightly.

But today the mourning can be mixed, and in at least equal proportions, with celebration. For the 50th anniversary of the crash was marked by United’s victory in the Champions League final. On a fraught, angst- ridden, rain-washed night, United prevailed over Chelsea. They did so by a hair, but victors are victors and losers losers. Sport always makes that point plain.

Winning the Barclays Premier League was not enough. Because the Babes perished on their way back from playing in the European Cup, it seemed wholly appropriate — to many it seemed more than that, a matter of nothing less than destiny — that United won the trophy that had been snatched from the Busby Babes.

That United team were the first English side to make a real impact on the competition, to have the vision and the courage to take on foreigners and risk being beaten by them. They beat the culture of insularity that has always been a part of English football, and English everything else for that matter. They had a fine team who might have won it, but instead, half a century on, it is as if a great wrong has been, in a very small way, righted.

English insularity is not what it was and that rule seems to count double in football. With a goal in open play scored by a Portuguese, the penalties put away by a polyglot, polychrome assortment of men and the crucial save made by a Dutchman, things have changed very much on the field. The fact that United are owned by Americans rather than local worthies also indicates a radical change.

But on the field it comes down to the same thing: skill against skill, strength against strength, guile and guile. Football was always like that; now, 50 years ago and back at the dawn of time. And this wholly appropriate victory will create profoundly mixed responses from footballing people across the land. The fact that the triumph is linked with the 50-year-old disaster will be seen by many as inflammatory. Sad to say, that is the nature of football.

I remember a woman of my acquaintance having her head turned by a bogus philosopher. “No unwilling victims,” she would proclaim to anyone who would listen, a statement bringing the obvious response: “What about the Jews?” “Oh, I’m sick of the bloody Jews,” she responded.

Well, plenty of people in football are sick of Manchester United and despise the fact that their supporters believe that the disaster has made them special. There exists a kind of Munich Denial, even a Munich Envy, and with it a kind of tortuous belief that United half-willed it upon themselves.

But great events shape the lives of institutions and those who are a part of them. The Chinese are still affected by the Tiananmen Square massacre, the Scots are still affected by Culloden. To bring things back down to football, Liverpool are still affected by Hillsborough and Juventus by Heysel and Bradford City by the fire. These great and terrible events become part of the way people see the world.

We are all, to an extent, defined by the terrible events we survive. That is true of the private events that involve us. It is also true, in a different sense, of the public events that reach out and touch us. To see the continuing mourning for the lost Babes as a kind of affectation is something that says rather too much about the culture of football.

And besides, the real point is that the death of the Babes was not a small, parochial affair. It was and is a story that has a universal meaning. These young men of matchless promise at the start of their lives but more than halfway to greatness; this is a thought to stir the heart. Their subsequent snatching away by a strange and freakish event has something of a touch of that overused, but for once almost appropriate word: tragedy. And there is nothing more universal than that.