Once upon a time, a long while back, the game most kids in middle India played and adored was football. This was before a Haryanvi lad who shaved with Palmolive and brushed his spoken English with Rapidex held aloft the Prudential World Cup at the Long Room Balcony at Lord’s, with his sparkling smile and defiant gaze capturing the imagination of a subcontinent on a balmy June evening in England.

For a boy growing up in the Seventies in the copper mining town of Ghatshila and with family connections to Calcutta that insidiously zig-zagged to the “other” Bengal, or “East Pakistan” as my grannies referred to the land of their origins, football was my first love. My maternal uncles — the full half-a-dozen of them — drummed into me and my many cousins very early in life that there really was one club and two colours that mattered: East Bengal and red-and-gold.

All through my boyhood and well into my early teens, East Bengal’s fortunes worried me a great deal. Summer vacations meant the family decamped to Calcutta and the reward for behaving well at my north Calcutta mamabari was often the privilege of being taken along to the Maidan, past the formidable mounted police and the stench of horse dung, to watch East Bengal games from the rickety galleries.

Back home in Ghatshila, the wait for the English newspaper, which arrived by train from Calcutta and did not get delivered before afternoon, was interminable. The match scores were devoured hungrily and scrapbooks battened with cutouts of derby match reports and East Bengal heroes.

Then 1983 happened. And not many years later, a short boy from Bombay with curly hair and a squeaky voice walked out to bat for India and sealed the deal for cricket. The nature of sports fandom in India changed radically and unrecognisably. Meanwhile, adulthood crept up silently, bringing in its wake the pursuit of other pleasures, piling on of mundane responsibilities. Somehow, almost unknowingly, the attraction for football faded away. But my passion for East Bengal simmered deep.

On Tuesday, I was back at the Salt Lake stadium after more than a decade to watch East Bengal play. The generosity of my friend Somangshu Biswas meant that I had tickets to the VIP section, something I couldn’t even dream of as a boy. With a few colleagues, all football fans of different stripes (including two native Chelsea supporters but with East Bengal shirts on), I was inside the stadium an hour before kick-off, allowing us to soak in the atmosphere.

Walking into the lively stadium – a heaving sea of red-and-gold — had the same electrifying effect, with the cacophonic rhythm of drums, cymbals and conches much the same as I remembered. But there was none of the usual aggressive banter, frisson and anxiety associated with previous East Bengal matches I had watched in the stadium against local clubs. This was virtually an India against Kuwait affair, much like the legendary East Bengal-Penarol IFA Shield semi-final match of 1985.

I spotted several Mohammedan Sporting banners and flags draped along the railings of the sections of the stadium usually reserved for that club, amidst all the East Bengal colours. The image struck me as a powerful symbol of a sport uniting and healing supporters of opposing clubs where history and politics had cleaved a culture and set communities against each other. Alas, I did not spot a single Mohun Bagan banner, but that is not to say a number of close macha friends were not expressing their solidarity with East Bengal on Facebook.

The first 40 minutes were evenly contested, and I dare say East Bengal dominated till the point where the home team’s defence tumbled against the brilliant pace of Rogerinho. The writing was very much on the wall by half-time, but for much of the lively first-half Salt Lake Stadium teetered on the verge of history.

And while there was hope, the flowery Maidan language flowed. Not many of these peachy turns of Bangla, as pungent and heady as the drink of the same name, can be reproduced in print. But after James Moga’s rather lacklustre performance and ill-mannered exit in the 51st minute, “Orey ki mogah re!? (What a fool this one is!) flashed on the Facebook page of Mohun Bagan supporter Indrajit Hazra, and was soon heard thereafter echoing through the galleries, fast emptying out.

Postscript: The Vivekananda Yuva Bharati Krirangan is in a shocking state of neglect and disrepair. Forget about spectator facilities such as electronic scoreboards, large time displays or decent F&B services; the hulking stadium, with thick cracks running along several corridors and pillars, its treacherous, moss-encased slippery steps, and unkempt vegetative overgrowth creeping towards the structure, gives the impression of being slowly consumed by a gigantic spider.