I came across a book in a second-hand bookshop last year that made me weep for five minutes. It was a photographic biography of Georgie Best, full of pictures of him in his sublime, impossibly handsome prime, playing on the field and off, posing with his beautiful house, sitting in sleek soft-tops with the most awe-inspiring women in the world, writes JohnWaters.
Best was my first hero, to the point of obsession. I grew my hair to look like him and tried unsuccessfully to get nicknamed "Georgie".
My scrapbooks of his dribblings and doings caused familial concerns about testosterone depletion. A briefly-charting song called Georgie, by Don Fardon, the most awful of records, became the first I ever bought.
When first I saw him play, in that European Cup encounter with Benfica, my life changed.
The reception was bad, and the game seemed to be played in a mist, from which occasionally this dark figure would emerge, running like a greyhound and turning like a ballerina, leaving a detritus of spread-eagled bodies behind him.
There was something literally superhuman in the way he played, something unworldly and yet transcendent in both the worldly and theological senses.
He did things that seemed both awesome and pointless - as though to demonstrate that the impossible was within reach. His genius, as it was named, involved the salutary demonstration of existential defiance, of individual triumph over those who make up the numbers.
His existence seemed to say that if you discover your own secrets, you can become a god while still walking the Earth. Georgie summed up better than anything - even the Beatles - the sixties idea of cutting yourself loose on the tide.
When I see now the man bearing the name George Best, I feel like he is part of me, like a residual fantasy that seeks to trick me into believing it came true. Only those flickering bits of footage serve to reassure us that George Best was not a dream.
When you haven't watched it for a while, you forget, lose faith in its ethereal qualities, imagine you have imagined it or fallen foul of hyperbole or wishful thinking.
And then, your breath is taken again. In a world where exaggeration is the authorised form of mass communication, George Best remains understated. He was better than it is possible for human minds to imagine.
The perennial discussions: "Giggsy or Bestie?" "Becks or Bestie?" "Keano or Bestie?" are just tabloid space-fillers. Even Pele, the closest anyone has come, put the matter to bed in a word. It was not false modesty: Pele was a better footballer, team player, all-rounder; but Best's genius started where Pele's ended - at the beginning of the impossible.
There are few things one can, with confidence, lay before a new generation, saying, "Take it outa that!"
Just as Buddy Holly means nothing to anyone who takes the Beatles for granted, most things we remember as precursors are meaningless to generations inoculated with sensation.
But there is one word I have heard more often than any other from the mouths of those watching those misty images for the first time, and that word is "Jesus". It is never a profanity.
We shake our heads about the tragedy of George Best: how he got waylaid by money and women and drink, how he had it all and threw it all way. But I don't know. I mourned when he left United, but perhaps he knew that there's a point beyond which repetition risks rendering the supernatural banal.
It's easy to fall into platitude about what he is "doing to himself", but the true mystery is: what drives him that he is not already dead?
Mostly we live on illusion. We build our dreams on the clouds above our heads, set our caps in that direction and strike onwards in hope.
The failure of this mechanism is the key to what we know as alcoholism.
The world knows little of this disease, imagining it crudely as some inexplicable dependence on a substance others can take or leave.
But it is more than that: drugs are a death-delaying short circuit for despair, the refuge of those who have lived or dreamt things that surpass their expectations.
Alcoholism happens to people when they reach a point where the future seems more pointless than the past has promised.
For mortals, there is hope of relief: you can restore the shattered illusions with new ones, earthly or otherwise.
But what when your dreams are behind, when you have been to Camelot already? And how to propose a spiritual awakening to one who knows, as you do, that he has walked in the skin of a god?