A ball crosses a line. Somewhere inside it, a microchip has already decided the outcome, and a graph spits out a blip that ends the argument before it’s even started, Cristiano Ronaldo moves on, Luka Modric goes home. A goal! No it’s offside. VAR confirms it. Nobody’s shouting at anyone. The game just continues, the spectators deflating, like a balloon that’s been let down gently rather than popped.

Cricket does the same trick with Snicko, a sound wave shaped like an edge, replayed in slow motion until the umpire’s finger becomes a formality rather than a verdict. Tennis got rid of line judges in the big matches altogether. It’s all electronic now. The ball is either in or out, and a machine says so, and that’s that.

I miss the arguing.

Not because I think the machines are wrong. They’re almost never wrong, that’s probably the problem. I miss the universally respected Dickie Bird up on his toes, finger raised, gesticulating an LBW that half the ground thought was plumb and the other half thought was scandalous, both halves would go home still convinced of their own version of events. I miss John McEnroe stopping a match cold to have a five minute full-blown row about chalk dust, because a man’s entire emotional state could hinge on whether a mark on grass was one millimetre this way or that. That wasn’t tennis breaking down. That was tennis, proper.

Here’s the thing about a wrong decision made by a human being under pressure: you remember it forever. A correct decision confirmed by a sensor, you forget by half time.

Which brings me to Abu Dhabi.

If you want the perfect proof of this, you don’t need to go looking for old grainy footage of umpires getting it wrong in 1958. You need Michael Masi, one lap, and a decision that will be argued about for as long as Formula One exists as a sport people care about.

The short version, for anyone who missed it: final F1 race of the 2021 season, title on the line between Hamilton and Verstappen, a late safety car, and a race director who made a call about which lapped cars could and couldn’t unlap themselves that directly manufactured a one-lap shootout finish instead of the race petering out under yellow flags. Verstappen on new tyres won the title on the last lap. Hamilton, by most reasonable readings of the sporting regulations as written, should have won the race in a parade under safety car conditions with the rules applied as they’d always been applied.

Five years on and it’s still not settled. It’ll never be settled. People will be arguing about Michael Masi’s headset on Internet forums in 2050 – if such things still exist.

And that’s exactly my point. Nobody talks about the pit stop that took 1.9 seconds instead of 1.8. But those of a certain age nostalgically compare the Tyrrell team in 1972 changing Jackie Stewarts’ wheels at a more leisurely pace. Nobody’s still arguing about a VAR offside from three seasons ago, because there’s nothing to argue about, the machine measured it and the machine was right. But Masi’s call wasn’t a measurement. It was a judgement, made by a stressed man on a radio channel full of screaming team principals, and judgement is the one thing that’s still allowed to be wrong, still allowed to be argued over, still allowed to define an era.

We built all this technology to remove human error from sport. Fair enough, on the face of it, nobody wants a championship title decided by a bad offside call that replays show was obviously wrong. But what we’ve actually removed isn’t error. It’s the argument itself, and it turns out the argument was doing more work than we gave it credit for. It’s what turned a match into a story. It’s what gave a decision a second life in the pub afterwards, the retelling, the re-litigating, the bloke in his armchair who still isn’t over it.

Masi proves the counterfactual perfectly, because his decision was almost certainly the wrong one, and that’s precisely why we’re all still talking about it. A machine wouldn’t have got it wrong. But nobody would remember it either.

Slow, human, fallible sport gave us Dickie Bird’s finger and McEnroe’s meltdowns and a race director’s fatal call on a headset. Fast, precise, electronic sport gives us certainty. I think we yearn for the slow lane really.

Because of that I’m not sure certainty was ever what we actually wanted.