Not once upon a time but a few months ago. Last year. Last season. Last May. In Cumbria, in Carlisle, where multi-coloured haulage trucks spray wet brown dirt the whole way to Brunton Park. There, at five-to-five on the eighth of the month, it happened. Professional football as comic fantasy.

The final corner of the final game of the final season of the century. Humiliation, relegation and possibly extinction are beckoning Carlisle United. They are drawing 1-1 with Plymouth Argyle at the bloody end of England's old fourth division. It is not good enough, hasn't been all season. But there is one last corner. It is at the gasworks end of the ground.

From the other end comes a man in red. Carlisle play in blue. He is their goalkeeper, Jimmy Glass. Well, he is not really Carlisle's goalkeeper, he belongs in fact to Swindon Town, but he has been at Carlisle for a couple of weeks on loan, helping them out during a goalkeeping crisis. He is 24, comes from Surrey and thinks he really should be doing better than scuffling around in the basement of English football.

After all, not so long ago Glass was at Crystal Palace, then in the Premiership. But Glass was young and by the time Palace went down he had departed for second division Bournemouth. At Bournemouth Glass improved. He started regularly for a season and when it ended he was one of the first to benefit from the new Bosman ruling. He signed for first division Swindon Town. No transfer fee, big salary. Things were looking up for Jimmy Glass.

And then it all began to unravel. Suddenly Jimmy was no longer first choice and, unhappy with the counterfeit feel of reserve team football, he volunteered to go out on loan. He was travelling again. Unknown to him, Carlisle would be his destination. Unknown to everybody, Carlisle would be also his destiny.

There were three games of last season to go when Glass arrived at Brunton Park. The first was against Darlington. Glass conceded a goal after seven minutes. Two more from Darlington followed. Luckily Carlisle scored three as well. The player who got their second is called Dick Tracey.

In the next match, at Hartlepool, Glass did better, a clean sheet. Hartlepool had one too. That left Carlisle on a cliff not unfamiliar to Scarborough's. While much of seaside Scarborough worried about the result of coastal erosion on their way of living, a few thousand others were at Scarborough's McCain Stadium - that's McCain as in oven chips - fretting over the erosion of Scarborough's 10-year Football League status.

Scarborough went behind after seven minutes. Seventeen minutes later, though, they equalised. The news spread panic around Carlisle. If they were to fall out of the League then there would be no professional football left in Cumbria. Barrow have gone, Workington have gone. Carlisle's chairman, Michael Knighton, was sweating in the director's box while the fans of his club gathered around to chant "fat greedy bastard" repeatedly.

But then came Glass' corner. He ran the hundred yards from his goal-line "just to get in there really" and ended up leading the evening news with his celebration, arms outstretched like an angel of the north.

Brunton Park almost dissolved, while Knighton began shouting that he believed "in Methuselah, flying saucers, men in the moon and on-loan goalkeepers who score goals". Glass' right boot was soon behind glass in the town's millennium exhibition.

Something remarkable happened that chaotic day and its ramifications are still being felt. Not only did Scarborough disappear into the Vauxhall Conference, Glass went back to Swindon's reserves, unable to agree terms with the club he saved. Carlisle are still trying to replace him. Some have been on-loan, others have got injured. One pulled his hamstring running for a taxi.

Two other significant names have also disappeared: Nigel Pearson, Carlisle's manager in May, and the coach, David Wilkes. Long after the drama of that afternoon was done, the two sat in Pearson's office, empty brandy bottle on the desk, speculating on the weirdness of football. Later they went back onto the field of fantastical dreams where Wilkes, whose career had been cut short by injury, continued his discourse on the vagaries of the sport.

He was half-bitter, but his view that the least understood aspect of professional football is its hardness struck a chord. Then Wilkes said something that has stayed in this head since. Despite thinking about it endlessly, its exact meaning remains mysterious, but what Wilkes seemed to be arguing was that simultaneously professional football is vast, small, beautiful and vicious.

"Out there," he said, nodding into a distance that incorporates both the Maracana and the McCain, "it's a parochial jungle."