Max Dowman [Jay Patel/SPP]

THE moment somebody who was born after you plays for Arsenal, it’s the final conformation that you know it’s not going to happen.

It’s the brutal realisation that you will not be a professional footballer and you will never play for the Gunners, as was meant to happen.

In hindsight, the clues were already there. Despite heroics in the Haringey Cup final of 1992, I wasn’t scouted on the school playing fields, and I never got picked up by a lesser team from which I could impress the Arsenal talent spotters from afar and work my way up through the divisions.

And when Nicolas Anelka turned out for the Gunners for the first time in 1997, that was it. A man younger than me was in the first team. I was already too old. I’d have to return to my chip dinner and coca-cola disappointed.

The same realisation should be dawning on a whole generation this week after the Max Dowman moment on Saturday night.

There the lad was, 16 ­– braces on, GCSEs to do, can’t buy a buzzball – racing the length of the pitch we’ll never play on and scoring a watershed goal in front of 60,000 fans.

Breathtaking, but a moment of self-reflection for us all about what we were all doing at the same age: Greasy hickeys, cemetery cider and a brainwashed belief that Blur were a good band. It’s OK, we don’t have to pretend on the latter, any more.

Troy Deeney perhaps said it all during his analysis on TV over the weekend, when he interrupted the endless conversations about how Arsenal are ugly to watch. He looked at the camera to tell his own 16-year-old son: “You need to do more…” Didn’t we all?

Deeney once famously accused Arsenal of not having the “cojones” to fight for big trophies – and revelled in the fact that he could use his muscle and strength to bump the Gunners off the ball while at Watford.

Now Arsenal players are doing just that, he’s in the studio complaining the team is showing the no fugs fight it was always accused of lacking.

It seems wrong to say a 16-year-old has the cojones for anything, but in that crazy two minutes on Saturday night, Dowman showed he had more nerve than everybody else.

Both he and Arsenal had come of age.