As the clock ticked into injury time on Saturday, I tried to console myself that at least I’d achieved a lifetime ambition of seeing Oxford United play in Europe. A biblical storm had been brewing around our Italian holiday apartment, so with kick-off approaching, we found a fertile wifi spot and fired up iFollow.

The storm, which belched out foreboding rumbles for at least an hour before it finally unleashed its full force seemed strangely analogous of the action being squirted down the recently installed super-fast, and ultimately shaky, fibre. Something was threatening, but it never quite arrived.

It had been a busy week, after the defeat to Derby I was at Wembley watching England’s women win the Euros. The reward of a rare moment of prescience on my part. A year ago, I decided there was little to lose from filling my boots with tickets for group games at Stadium MK, the semi-final between Germany and France and Sunday’s final at Wembley.

I loved it; my whole experience of the tournament, and of the women’s game more generally, reminded me of a study done by former Oxford United director Desmond Morris of football Oxford fans in the 1980s. His observations, which became the book The Soccer Tribe, had led him to conclude that football should remain a primal, combative and explicitly male game. Attempts to modernise – there was growing pressure because of financial problems and hooliganism – to make it more family friendly, less aggressive and more inclusive, he felt, would kill its core value.

I see that, if you over-sanitise football it becomes very boring. It needs a competitive edge. But, as Robyn Cowan pointed out on the Guardian Weekly podcast, nobody booed the German national anthem, nobody stuck a firework up their backside, nobody was arrested at Wembley or in Trafalgar Square. There were plenty of German fans around us, nobody made a single derogatory comment about them, spoke in a funny German accent or mentioned the war. I don’t remember anyone swearing (apart from Jill Scott, but we didn’t know that until we saw Twitter). My daughter habitually joins in with any football song regardless of the language being used, if people don’t call the referee a cunt, then neither will she. That must be a good thing.

And yet, the final still had edge, needle and tension. I know this because when the Germans equalised my immediate reaction was to disown the whole thing as a pointless façade and resist the urge to go home, which is the same feeling I had after Ryan Clarke dropped the ball into his own net at Wembley in 2010.  

It turns out that many accepted football norms; aggression, abuse, xenophobia, racism, are a choice and not priced into what makes the game great. Sunday showed that and Desmond Morris was wrong; football can offer all its glories without the primal baggage he believed fuelled it. He just didn’t have the imagination to see things differently.

The preceding 92 minutes on Saturday had been an extension of what happened at Derby. We looked solid and able to withstand a well organised and robust Cambridge side, but we failed to bridge the gap between strong and threatening.

There’s a line from the book Inverting the Pyramid that always stuck with me; fans want teams to win, managers want teams to avoid losing. Their job is so precarious, they become naturally conservative in the way they operate. If you listen to the BBC podcast, The Moment of Truth, about us and Rotherham last season, you’ll get a sense of the fear of failure that Karl Robinson has. How consumed he becomes about letting people down. There’s a risk that by addressing our weaknesses we supress our strengths, there have been some signs of that this season, we look more solid, but chances have been at a premium and Matt Taylor has been relatively anonymous as a result. 

I’m torn by the view that England’s success last week was ‘football coming home’; a lament about breaking a long sequence of failure. Yes, the women’s success sits alongside the men’s success, but theirs wasn’t burdened by that history of failure. Theirs is a re-imagining of the game, the righting of a ludicrous decision to ban the women’s game in 1921, to persevere and succeed against a tide of people who believed they didn’t deserve it. It’s justice and the right to be judged as elite athletes not as women playing a man’s sport. It’s all success.

So, with injury time approaching, it took a player also without a burden of history and expectation to pick the ball up on the left and see what he could do. Tyler Goodrham wasn’t weighed down by the expectation the play-offs or by defending any personal reputation. The point we were defending didn’t mean anything to him. He’s just a young player who wants to prove himself. He has everything to gain and little to lose. In a few years maybe he’ll cut that ball back or try to find a more reliable and sensible route to goal. I hope not. 

Not this time, he danced through the Cambridge defence, defying logic and team instructions, taking a risk to score a goal. Sometimes we have to reimagine history and play without fear of judgement to succeed.

We needed that, Tuesday’s game against Swansea and an always tricky game at Bristol Rovers could have seen us staring at a crisis of confidence four games into the season. As Goodrham wheeled away, he was consumed by the rest of the team, a great suffocating pile-on in front of the South Stand. From down the touchline appeared the manager body slamming all of them into the turf. The weight of a football club on top of one teenager. Some might see that as that as an analogy for his future. But maybe now is not that time.