One was Swedish footballer Lina Hurtig's penalty in Melbourne that sent the mighty United States crashing out of the Women's World Cup at the last 16 stage.

You will very likely have seen the goal-line technology image showing just how close US goalkeeper Alyssa Naeher came to keeping the ball out before the sound system at Rectangular Stadium began belting out the unimpeachably Swedish strains of Dancing Queen by Abba.

The other was my insidethegames colleague Philip Barker’s recent visit to the Stalin-era Tofik Bakhramov Stadium in Baku, coinciding with the chess World Cup.

Those of you who have watched Barker's video report will know that Bakhramov remains almost certainly the world's most famous linesman several decades after he hung up his flag.

This is the legacy of the key role he played in awarding England’s third goal in the 1966 World Cup final against West Germany at Wembley Stadium.

A shot from England striker Geoff Hurst cannoned down from the crossbar onto the ground and away.

Was it over the goal-line when it bounced?

With the game entirely dependent at that time on the best judgement of its human officials - in this case Bakhramov and Gottfried Dienst, the Swiss referee - that question has never been definitively resolved.

At the time, of course, the goal stood, and England went on to win the match 4-2, still the only time its men’s team has lifted international football’s most storied and glittering prize.

Flash forward thirty-some years and I am living in Paris, working as correspondent for a London-based newspaper.

It is a heady time: France has recently won its own first men’s World Cup; the financial crisis is still some years away; the burst of creativity spawned by the digital and communications revolutions is in full spate.

This rather febrile zeitgeist is reflected by a mounting inflow of correspondence crossing my desk from embryonic tech companies with buzzy names, most of which I ignored.

Somehow the efforts of a young computer-assisted design company in Lyon caught my eye.

As I recall, one of their Big Ideas at the time was to use sophisticated three-dimensional mapping techniques to capture precisely how animals, and for that matter people, moved.

The thinking was to then apply this information to make animated films and video games much more realistic.

Examples of their work looked mightily impressive.

I made arrangements to drop by and see them during a visit to the Rhône-Alpes region.

I remember a typical start-up environment: a dozen or so T-shirted young men (mainly) and women in front of computer screens in an old factory in a part of Lyon I was not familiar with.

I do not recall exactly how the eureka moment came to me, although a notebook I have unearthed indicates that they mentioned a piece of work they had done related to that recent French World Cup, at which both Lyon and nearby Saint-Etienne hosted games.

Perhaps that triggered something.

Anyway, let’s imagine I was back in Paris enjoying a pre-prandial Kir in Place de la Madeleine after a relaxing afternoon at some art-house cinema.

"Hang on a minute," I thought, "if these people can track and map every movement of a loping feline's leg so accurately, if they can prepare material that shows an incident in a recent game from the referee’s perspective, shouldn’t they be able to work out the exact position of the ball when it bounced down from the crossbar in that long-ago World Cup final?"

This was pre-YouTube, but I had a recording of the match on whatever technology was current at the time.

I phoned them up and explained my proposition; they seemed game, so I sent them the recording, highlighting the relevant passage of play and waited, while starting to plan how we would break the resulting "Exclusive" to an unsuspecting world.

I mean, one of the beauties of this story was that it would create a sensation whatever side of the goal-line the ball was shown to have bounced, right?

I was so excited I was virtually writing my Pulitzer speech.

Then I heard back from them.

Alas, my cunning plan had a teeny flaw.

To plot the location of the ball in the way intended, they would need at least two camera angles of the incident.

The video offered only one.

It was back to the drawing-board.

Far from marking me out for long overdue recognition as a new Gellhorn or McIlvanney, the episode left me feeling like a journalistic version of Baldrick, the hapless manservant in the Blackadder television comedy series.

C’est la vie.