Recently I went to the old house of some childhood friends. I say ‘old house’ because nobody has lived there since the 1980s and it’s now more or less derelict. Of course, I didn’t know this at first because it’s at the end of a long sloping laneway.

On my walk, before reaching the house, my head was abuzz with memories and mental photographs. I remembered a big room that was a combination of kitchen, living room and dining room all in one – the place where we’d come in for tea and biscuits during breaks in games of football or whatever sport we were playing.

Sometimes on rainy days too, we’d stay in and read comic books or maybe watch programmes on the tiny square of a black 'n’ white TV. Gary Lineker scored a goal in that kitchen in the 1986 FA Cup final for Everton against Liverpool. Maradona played there later that same summer when Argentina won the World Cup in Mexico.

Thinking of World Cups, I remember the joy of Panini sticker albums too. Those were the days long before a Panini was a thing you ordered for lunch.

Back then, we got nothing more than plain sandwiches washed down with a mug of ‘tae.’ So I was excited heading up that lane.

But when I got there, I was in for surprise – not just because the crumbling old building was proof that time doesn’t stand still. I was also shocked at how small the whole thing was, especially the wee main room.

This wasn’t the same place as existed in the giant flatscreen of my memory. It was more like that black 'n’ white TV that Gary Lineker used to run around on.

How in the name of Joseph, Mary and the wee donkey did we all fit into that small space?

The answer to it would surely be worth an ‘A’ grade in any 11-plus paper.

Sometimes there’d be half a dozen children there, a couple of dogs and three or four adults, running round the place like stock car racers. The children that is, not the adults or the dogs.

They were generally better behaved as far as I can remember.

Outside too, the fields where we kicked footballs till they burst had got far smaller. Surely these weren’t the places where FA Cups and All-Irelands were won in the imaginary finals we’d have between Liverpool and United or Tyrone and Fermanagh?

Time had also stolen miles off the vast boglands beyond the house, where we’d run through swathes of heather after summer’s sun had hardened the black and buttery ground. There, we used to run as fast as Ben Johnson without the steroids.

Sometimes too, we did decathlons that’d put Daley Thompson to shame. Of course if you weren’t looking where you were going and leapt across the auld heather into a mucky bog hole, the decathlon would turn to a triathlon very quick – the one where you have to swim, cycle and run your way towards a gold medal.

In all these games we had a great sense of imagination. Every sporting contest seemed to involve some kind of fiction and we played them all, from Denis Taylor’s snooker to Barry McGuigan’s boxing.

We probably even made a fiction out of card games and board games and comic books indoors, when rain stopped play.

And there was definitely a lot of rain about the place, on the borders of Fermanagh and Tyrone, in a townland called Foglish. Of course, in the soft light of memory, it’s mostly the sunny days that stand out as golden as the glint of an Olympic medal.

There were great conversations too, from what I remember. We all had grand dreams of what we were going to be when we grew up.

At one point, I remember causing some consternation when I suggested I might become a part-time priest and footballer, playing for Liverpool on Saturdays and then saying Mass on a Sunday.

So that old house wasn’t just a sports hub. It was a place that rewrote the rules of religious vocations and plotted out destinies that’d be written into the history books.

But all the childhood imagination in the world can’t stop time and the elements.

Seeing the shell of that old place, I wouldn’t say that I was taken aback though. Looking at it from a more positive angle, I would actually say that I was brought back to a time of smaller screens and lower electric bills, when our childhoods were more unplugged. And we talked instead of texting.

Long ago, we used to have to make our own entertainment in a very different way.

We had no computers, or iPads, or the internet with information at the single click of a button.

Sometimes we wouldn’t even know the Saturday football results, if we missed the evening news, until we got the papers after Mass on Sunday morning.

It was much harder to access any of the information we take for granted nowadays and yet I would argue that people were no less clued in on current affairs. They spent more time reading newspapers and less time engaged with social media.

We didn’t measure our lives in the number of likes we got for pictures of our dinner. We didn't have iPads or any kind of gadget that would give us instant text, instant pictures and instant gratification. We didn't have Instagram or YouTube.

Probably the closest we came to home-made videos was in seeing the archaic wedding footage that parents or aunts and uncles would take out to show sporadically. There was usually nothing fancy about it and it lasted less than half an hour.

Back then, the greatest repository of pictures was found in our memories. And I remember my less-plugged and less-pixellated childhood days just as clearly as if I’d a thousand photographs of that time period.

Unfortunately, back then too, it wasn’t as handy to take a million pictures of everything that moved.

But behind the shell of that old house, I found many happy memories. Sometimes a trip down memory lane can be as good as a holiday in the sun.

Roll on that point in the future when technology can find a way of actually taking us back in time!