By now you’ve all seen it. It happens so fast you have to check twice to confirm what you’ve just witnessed. After a quick opening exchange, Schalke keeper Manuel Neuer comes rushing out of his goal mouth to head clear an incoming long ball courtesy of Inter’s Cambiasso. Nothing peculiar there, except that Neuer is now lying prone in the grass about over twenty yards from goal.

Dejan Stankovic surveys the situation and makes a split second decision. He pivots near centre circle and hits the ball on the volley from whence it came, past Neuer and into the back of the net, 1-0. Now announcers and commentators the world round are now talking goal of the season, and how the Champions League holders are sure to run away with the first leg after a stunner like that.

The irony of course is that it would be Schalke coach Ralf Rangnick who would go on to call the game the “most beautiful” of his career, in part because his team managed to pull it together and answer Stankovic’s thing of beauty (and Milito’s off-sidish second) five times. But Stank’s opener briefly rekindled the debate no one wants to have in football: to what extent was Stankovic’s goal a lucky, reflex-driven one-off, or a beautifully executed strike?

I mentioned this to someone on twitter yesterday and they warned me not to “take this logic too far.” And it’s true; anyone who’s ever played the game knows there is always an element of hit-and-hope when striking at goal. If you pick at this aspect of football—blind luck—you’ll end up unraveling the entire sport.

Yet while luck does play a part, it’s only part of the story. Nothing in football is ever deliberately pre-meditated on the pitch. The planning happens in training and in the experience of playing, where Stankovic would have unconsciously learned over time to properly weight a strike while pivoting his body in order to get it in goal from distance, and to pull it off in a matter of mere seconds.

Still, in football there is a wide margin for error in these situations. How many times out of ten would Stankovic’s strike have careened so serenely into the net? It seems for every thing of beauty there are ten shanks to row z, plus a couple of “if that had gone in, wow”s. But if football is merely a series of attempts at the same thing, with a precious few coming off while the rest are forgotten, why do we celebrate the lucky one-offs as if they were always meant to be?

Stankovic has scored nine goals this year in all competitions (including with Serbia) from 88 shots, a roughly one-in-ten margin. Obviously Stankovic is a midfielder so is likely shooting more from distance as a rule, but for every nine shots, he’s getting one in (incidentally, Lionel Messi’s ratio is 1 in 4). But this ratio tells you little about Stankovic as a player. Neither, in a certain sense, does last night’s wonder strike.

This is why the highlight reel is so deceptive in football, or all sports for that matter. It’s like the Heisenburg uncertainty principle in quantum physics, which dictates you can either know a lot about the speed of a particle or its position, but not both at the same time. We know that what Stankovic did last night was amazing, but it lives by itself on the highlight reel and tells us nothing about the player in terms of overall consistency. In some sense, because of Stankovic’s experience, preparation, and in-born talent, he would pull off something like that half line volley more often than most other similar players, but most other players could do what he did eventually. Just not often enough to ever make the Inter Milan first team.

So what’s important isn’t that Stank scored the goal of the season last night, but his overall influence for his team. He was subbed off injured in the 23rd minute with only 6 passes attempted, so we’ll never know if he could’ve helped prevent Schalke’s rampant 15 minute goal fest. Instead, he has one for the highlight reel, comforting us with the illusion that skill in football is as intricately planned as an ice skating routine, and not a series of beautiful flukes which generate a lot of sound and fury from fans and pundits, but often signify nothing.