Maybe it’s just the time of year which makes us all sentimental. Maybe everyone thinks football was better in ‘their day’ and overestimates how good and how popular aspects of it were.

But there must be something in it when, almost quarter of a century since it ceased to exist, one of the most regularly asked questions in Scottish football remains… Why don’t they bring back the Tennent's Sixes?

For an event which was, essentially, a laugh – a notentirely competitive tournament of patchwork squads keeping in out of the cold on a January weekend – it fairly penetrated the public consciousness, gaining cult status over its decade of existence. It is no coincidence that the Tennent's Sixes crowned its last champions in 1993, months before the re-branded Champions League and English Premier League anointed their first: as football morphed from a game into an economic commodity, the idea that its senior entertainment executives (players, to you and me) should be allowed to submit themselves to the possibility of becoming structurally sub-optimal (ie injured) by participating in a gymnasium kickabout, solely for the amusement of the viewers of Scotsport, could not be tolerated. But perhaps the planets, which thereafter moved off to continue their inevitable orbit around Rupert Murdoch, are now beginning to come back into alignment for the presence of this winter diversion to be accepted once more.

For one, we are about to head off (once we get these eight matches in December out of the way) for a ‘winter break’: there will be no football for fans of Scottish Premiership clubs to get excited about for the whole of the first three weeks in January. So there is both practical opportunity for future years’ calendars to accommodate such an event without interfering with (or being overshadowed by) other fixtures, and economic opportunity to slake Scotland’s thirst for top-level football at a time when none is on.

Another interesting development which might lead us to contemplate if there is a future for this discontinued jamboree is the recent exposition of Project Brave: the SFA’s blueprint for the radical reimagination of youth football. If this is so radical as to follow the example of the Pixar film after which it is named – ie feeding YTSers magic cakes so that they turn into unruly bears who try to bite Billy Connolly’s leg off – then it will be Brave indeed, if not necessarily a complete reversal of life as it already is for Scotland’s swaggering football starlets, but although the details leaked to date have proved controversial (one for another day, perhaps) some certainly have great merit. In this particular context, it is the proposal to move Academy football to the summer months, and have the youngsters spend the winter playing futsal.

This indoor version of soccer has taken great strides since 1993 and is essentially a fully-fledged sport in its own right, requiring a more technical approach than the often detrimentally physical outdoor game. It is undeniably a useful tool in helping Scottish kids to develop the ball skills so patently lacking in their elders and will be great for Scotland if it is adopted in an organised, immersive way for the Premiership’s age group players.

But if we have scores of top young players already playing indoor football full-time, what is to stop all those clubs convening in an arena one weekend in January for a 10- or 12-team tournament? Let’s say five or six under-19s and a sprinkling of better-known overage wildcards from those not off training in Dubai; live all day on BBC Alba; bucket hats on and it’s back to the ‘90s. Nae quite the Tennent's Sixes like – there’s 16.7% fewer players in a futsal team for starters and you couldn’t have a booze firm sponsoring a youth football tournament – but the Moray Cup Fives sounds good.

You heard it here first.