"Football was invented in 1992." It's a preposterous statement never sincerely uttered or written, but often inferred.
Just as 1966 has become more than just a string of four numbers -- whether you were alive back then or not -- the year the Premier League was established, 1992, has found itself inextricably linked with Sky Sports' overwhelming stranglehold on football and the "invention" of the Premier League. By extension, it's seen as "Year Zero" for the money-driven, cynical image of the top flight since it broke away from the rest.
Twenty-three years in and we barely think twice about recognising Premier League records. Daniel Sturridge celebrated his return from injury with two goals against Aston Villa that took his tally to 37 in 57 games and gave him the best Premier League scoring rate (0.65 per game) of any Liverpool striker. That data, by definition, excludes the goal-scoring exploits of Ian Rush, John Aldridge and Roger Hunt from the pre-'92 eras.
Chelsea's dreadful title defence is their worst start to a season since the 1980s, but it is nevertheless presented in a Premier League context. The same applies to Swansea City's "record" eighth-place finish last season, which cruelly ignores their buccaneering 1981-82 gate-crashing of the top six.
Some consider 1992 to be an entirely arbitrary milestone, save for a mere rebranding of England's top division. But is it a fraudulent one? Are the Premier League-oriented databases cheating everyone out of the previous century of footballing achievement?
Not quite. The breakaway of 22 clubs from the Football League in 1992 was a seismic event for the English game, but plenty of ground was being broken elsewhere in the football world. The European Cup, the most straightforward of knockout competitions for the continent's elite, gave way to the rather more protracted jamboree of the Champions League. The foundations of football were intact, but the rest was being fundamentally rebuilt.
Meanwhile, modern football's Big Bang was helped along by the shrewdest adjustment of the Laws of the Game since someone in 1882 decided a crossbar might be quite useful. A goal-shy World Cup at Italia '90 and more time-wasting shenanigans at Euro '92, led the head-scratchers of the International Football Association Board to usher in the back-pass law.
Starting with the 1992-93 season, goalkeepers were no longer permitted to handle a deliberate pass from a teammate. Looking back, it seems peculiar that any slender lead was ever thrown away given the legal escape route of being able to punt the ball back to their keeper's welcome arms. This perfectly judged tweak of the rulebook has been oddly overlooked as a huge contributor to the high-octane game we watch today.
Ultimately, the Premier League era was given the chance to prosper by something it had no part in creating. Sky Sports' promotional push described the new competition as "a whole new ball game" -- and it literally was.
Elsewhere, free from the associations of shameless moneymaking, little fuss is made of "postwar" football records. Would the Arsenal sides of the mid-to-late 1930s be content to be fenced off from the emerging Liverpool and Manchester United teams of the late 1940s just because of the statistical bookend of the Second World War?
While football ground to a halt from 1939 to '45 -- bringing a huge number of careers to an end as a result -- 1992 also followed a period of enforced inactivity. The ban on English clubs in European competition was only fully lifted in 1991, six years after the Heysel Stadium disaster.
Football is subject to its own equivalent of Moore's Law -- tactically, technologically, medically, the game becomes more and more sophisticated by the year. If the proverbial "week" is a long time in football, 23 years is comfortably an entire evolutionary chapter in its own right.
Such has been the dramatic acceleration of advances in almost every aspect, that the comparisons between Lionel Messi and Pele or Wayne Rooney and Sir Bobby Charlton become spectacularly pointless. How far back through the decades would a time-machine-inventing League Two player have to travel to be considered world-class?
If the game has developed steadily with the progressing years, picking any particular point to virtually reset footballing records would indeed be unhelpful. But 1992 -- whatever the vested interests the broadcasters have for using it as a reference point -- was undoubtedly football's quantum leap. The average Premier League player is 26 years old; he barely kicked his first innocent ball by the time the league began in earnest.
Until the moment that football -- including Sky Sports -- starts flat-out denying the past ever happened, few can have complaints about logical lines being drawn in the sands of time.