Personally I have always had a thing about going back to places.

Standing on what was once the doorstep of the house I lived in as a young child which was knocked down to accommodate the M62.

Returning to the primary school playground wall where I once knocked myself unconscious in comic-book style, seeing red and yellow stars and waking to a circle of faces.

Sitting mournfully in my secondary school’s old domestic science room, that smelled of dust and pastry, and recalling the carefree times I had had in it as a first year. All of two years earlier...

So perhaps it is not surprising that, given freedom to choose, I return to familiar sporting territory. Sure-fire bets. And, to be specific, the 1966 World Cup final.

Reading David Owen’s evocative recollections of the 1970 Mexico World Cup finals on this site a couple of weeks ago, I was taken by his reference to a phrase originated - it sounds like - by cricket writer Jon Hotten, namely "the availability heuristic".

Hotten explains that "human judgement usually relies on the most easily recalled piece of information". In other words, "the players of the past get hazy, distilled down to one or two reducible facets".

For my colleague, the 1970 World Cup tournament can be expressed in that fashion by the piledriving fourth goal scored by Brazil’s captain Carlos Alberto to give his side a 4-1 win over Italy in the final, although he adds that, for fans of England, the Gordon Banks save from Pelé in the group match meeting might be the overriding representative memory.

By the same token, again and again, the availability heuristic of the World Cup finals of 1966 is the footage of Geoff Hurst’s last-gasp completion of his hat-trick in the final against West Germany, to Kenneth Wolstenholme’s celebrated BBC commentary…

"Some people are on the pitch. They think it’s all over. It is now."

My friend and erstwhile colleague Ian Ridley recalls a 1992 interview with Wolstenholme in which the latter insisted he had said "Well, it is now." Like Ian, I can’t hear it if he did.

It’s not hard to understand why I, like so many thousands of others, am drawn back to that rainy and sunny July afternoon at the old Wembley Stadium. Those 1966 World Cup finals were the first big sporting occasion to make any impact upon me. Although I recall hearing the theme music for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, I took no interest in the Games themselves.

Having gravely consulted the Radio Times preview I had concluded that England would win the World Cup and sat in front of the television, sometimes but not always with my dad, in expectation of that outcome. When it, eventually, arrived, I had my first experience - replicated many times since, and mostly but not exclusively while watching England’s football team - of a kind of unhealthy exhaustion. And I hadn’t even done anything! Very strange.

Shortly after that final my dad was bidden to kick a ball around with me in the back garden, and told that I would be Geoff Hurst, while he could be Roger Hunt. Some symbolism there, in retrospect…

It feels almost illicit having time to review one’s favourite sporting memories. I suppose I am just a sad sporting version of those people who have seen Phantom of the Opera or Les Miserables 50 times. (Having watched the latter once, I concur with the view that the title best describes the audience.)

While I haven’t seen that final 50 times, I am probably into double figures. Which means that, for me, "the availability heuristic" has been somewhat expanded. Of course, in my mind’s eye, I can still see Hurst catching that ball just as it appears to bobble up, and clouting it in a direction that, he insisted, might just as well have been the stands at that moment, but turned out, gloriously, to be the top of the net.

Of course I can see Martin Peters moving in as he did so often and so sublimely to despatch the ball that had looped up off the leg of Horst-Dieter Hottges with one controlled, stabbing drive to give England a 2-1 lead that, surely, would see them through.

But the more I watch this match the more details I absorb. Why do I bother? What am I trying to recapture? I honestly don’t know. But trying to stop the process is like telling the tide to turn…

So I note the prolonged hopelessness of Lothar Emmerich’s contributions, the big gun of his left foot lacking any shell in its breech. And the prolonged, intermittent, high explosive threat of Siggi Held. Had there been two Helds playing, one to finish what the other constantly strove to create…well, as an Englishman I hardly like to think what might have happened…

It was Held who earned the free-kick which led to West Germany’s dramatic equaliser by – depending on your point of view - either being fouled by Jack Charlton or making a back for the centre half as he sought to head the ball clear.

Wolfgang Overath, too, was a telling operator for West Germany throughout, as vital to their function as was Peters to the England team, particularly with Bobby Charlton and Franz Beckenbauer reducing each other to a series of tantalising flourishes, notes on an exhibition that was never allowed to take place.

It was, naturally, Overath who tracked back in that last exhausting passage of play to come within a yard of halting Hurst’s final incursion. For which honourable hardiness he now finds himself immortalised next to the English hero on a thousand beach towels. Got one upstairs.

Bobby Moore. So classically composed at the back - but how urgently England’s captain moved upfield after England went a goal down.

Nobby Stiles. Of course, you expect to see how he harries and chivvies and chips away just outside the penalty area. But how often he breaks forward, and how accurately he passes. That superb ball down the right wing ten minutes into extra-time, finding Alan Ball, whose cross was hammered home via the bar by Hurst to make it 3-2.

Or not, depending on your point of view.

Having read Stiles’s book, After The Ball, written with my late and esteemed colleague James Lawton, I now always look out for that moment in the second period of extra-time when the Manchester United man strives to make his own headway down the right wing.

"I looked up and said to myself, 'Yes, near post, I’ll go for that’,”, Stiles writes. “But when I came to make contact with the ball something shocking and terrifying happened. I felt everything go. The sensation was of whoosh, and everything had left me.

"The ball trickled off the toe of my boot and over the line. The crowd sighed and fell silent. I just stood there, empty, and one concern was that my bowels had emptied, which would have been a terrible embarrassment because unlike my team-mates I didn’t wear a jock-strap or a slip beneath my shorts."

The worst had not happened. I see Stiles tracking back, a little less intent than usual, but still there, lining up, doing his duty to the last…

I might watch it again tonight.