LONG before aerodynamics and thermally-bonded synthetic panels, my football dreams were made of cheap plastic, purchased for a dollar and fifty cents at the friendly neighbourhood provision store.
These air-filled spheres were primitive, but they were all I could afford on my primary school stipend.
Available in rusty red, garish green or boring blue, they were enough for me to run rings around 'defenders', namely the chairs, tables and assorted family members in my living room.
But they were vulnerable too. Many a plastic ball met an untimely demise beneath my mother’s kitchen clogs, or worse, a neighbour’s passing bicycle.
I longed desperately for something more durable - like the shiny, polyurethane-coated wonder that Diego Maradona caressed with his feet at the 1986 World Cup.
I learned later that it was named the Azteca, though it might as well have been called the Moon, for it seemed just as unattainable.
It turned out that the Azteca was the World Cup’s first synthetic ball and one of the first that was water-resistant. This meant that it did not turn into a soggy, overweight orb at the first kiss of rain, and threaten concussion on any player brave enough to head it.
These days, the ubiquitous ball has become less of a blunt instrument and more of a high-tech weapon.
Leather and inflatable animal bladders have long been consigned to museums, and words like polyurethane, polyethylene and syntactic foam have entered the game’s vernacular.
Since Fifa bequeathed the job of manufacturing World Cup balls to adidas in 1970, football-making is now the exclusive domain of men in lab coats, whose goals are to make them lighter, faster and easier to control.
Their latest labour of science is the Jabulani, a fully-synthetic, thermally-bonded ball that will grace next month’s World Cup in South Africa.
According to its creators at the adidas testing labs in Scheinfeld, Germany, it is rounder and more accurate than any other football in history.
Nearly 20 months were needed to test the ball, using both wind tunnels and robotic legs to fine-tune aerodynamics and durability.
The end result, according to the glossy PR brochures, will guarantee plenty of goals, while providing better grip for goalkeepers who habitually grumble about every new World Cup ball.
The price, predictably, matches the hype. The Jabulani retails at about $180 - enough to buy more than a hundred of those plastic contraptions that lit up my childhood and vexed my mother.
For me, the romance of the game still lies in the kicking and the dreaming.
The late, great Brazilian Didi, for instance, did not need fancy balls to pull off his famous 'dry leaf' kick - a long shot that would seem as if it was overhit, but drift into goal at the last moment, much like how a leaf would fall off a tree.
All this, with a brown, wobbly, leathery ball that changed its shape depending on where you kicked it.
Still, there is something magical about unwrapping a new football and punting it about on the school field for the first time.
As the legendary German striker Uwe Seeler once said, '“The secret of football is the ball.'
For the record, I did finally get the Azteca - a second-hand replica that was presented to me on my 12th birthday. It lasted all of two weeks before an errant kick sent it deep into the bowels of a nearby construction site.
This year’s World Cup ball, I trust, will be far more enduring, and just as endearing.