You can yawn at the league fixture lists, parse through countless transfer rumours, tally up Big Club title wins, sit through utterly predictable matches featuring the usual suspects producing the usual results in the usual tournaments, read about FIFA corruption allegations or undercover television stings in which we discover, finally, that football is not a sport but a business, and then find yourself reading yet another Cesc to Barca story which puts you right on the cusp of leaving the game altogether to take up…what? Cricket?

Then you get a summer like this summer: Brazil and Argentina out of the Copa America, with Uruguay making a case for confederation title number 15 only a year after their magnificent fourth place finish at the World Cup, in a weird final four with Peru, Paraguay and Venezuela (!). A reminder that South America is moving further toward something resembling competitive parity, challenging long-held European assumptions about a South American World Cup qualifying ‘bye’.

Then there was Japan fighting back to equalize twice, once in extra time, to take the Womens World Cup final to penalties, where they beat the Americans to win Japan and Asia’s highest football title—an amazing final capping to an amazing tournament, which should herald a turning point in women’s soccer (and underline, in vain, Jonathan Wilson’s thesis that 16 teams in a tournament is always better than 32).

What’s more, the WWC in particular and women’s football in general is still an undiscovered country. Talk of bad women goal-keeping gave way to talk of women engaging in a more ‘honourable’ style of play than the men. Not the most compelling or progressive narrative perhaps, but at least something different, and positive. Whether it will boost the fortunes of the WPS in the US remains to be seen.

And finally, we even got a little bit of cheek in a sport where humour and creativity has long been buried under dollar signs: the UAE’s Awana Diab’s back-heeled penalty against Lebanon raised eyebrows and consternation even as it generated countless views on YouTube. The UAE national team manager Esmaeel Rashed of course felt obligated to wag his finger and mention some piffle about “respect,” a morally-heavy term which, interpreted narrowly, would have quashed every creative player from Garrincha through to Sindelar. No matter; what the world got finally was something new, which, thanks to the Internet, can never be taken away from us.

So all in all, not bad. And we’ve still got a little while to go before the European gears start grinding, and before TFC fail to make the playoffs again. If you can manage to avoid the Hargreaves to Whitecaps stuff, you’ve got a football summer to remember.