At least he ended up with an assist from it. It was a whisker from being one of the goals of the season, as Leon Goretzka threw a bicycle kick at Breel Embolo’s cross, and Sven Ulreich looked beaten. Unfortunately, the ball didn’t connect with his laces but flicked off the outside of his boot – falling to Franco Di Santo at the back post, who applied a measured finish.

No matter. It was, Goretzka told Sky afterwards without the smallest hint of bashfulness, something he’d managed before. “It wasn’t as it should have been today,” he shrugged, “but it ended in a goal, which is the most important thing.” No matter either that Di Santo’s strike offered Schalke only brief parity at the Allianz Arena, with Thomas Müller slotting home a winner later in the first half after Robert Lewandowski had got things started.

The result may have hurt Die Königblauen – sporting director Christian Heidel mused that after being narrowly beaten in a match Schalke were genuinely in until they ran out of gas in the final quarter that “you’re even more disappointed than if you lost 3-0 and never had a chance” – but Goretzka had proven a point, at least of sorts. Faced with widespread opprobrium after the January announcement he would join Bayern this summer, this had always looked like an awkward afternoon, albeit an easier one than if Schalke had been hosting Bayern in front of 60,000 in Gelsenkirchen.

Schalke, it’s worth underlining, were the original, pre-Bundesliga (and pre-Bayern) giants of German football. If having your best players pinched by the perennial champions is a fact of life at the sharp end of the German game, it is never one this club have found easy to accept. When Manuel Neuer left for Bayern in 2011, the ire was similar. One supporter even slapped Neuer during the club’s DfB Pokal victory celebrations that year.

That may be well beyond the realms of acceptability, but chairman Clemens Tönnies knew how the majority of fans, who kept their anger on a vocal medium, felt. “My first reaction,” he recounted “was, [he] shouldn’t wear the Schalke shirt any more.”

A pre-match rumour that Max Meyer, also out of contract in the summer, had agreed to follow Goretzka to Bayern, had further sent a shiver down Schalke spines. The story, from El Mundo Deportivo, was later shot down by Bayern sporting director Hasan Salihamidzic. “If it’s from Spain, that would explain why it’s in Spanish,” he grinned – but even if it might have defied logic, it’s hard to blame Schalke for being paranoid.

For some of their supporters, even Salihamidzic’s assuaging words probably carried some bite. He made clear that Bayern had no need for Meyer, despite his quality, as they already have an embarrassment of midfield riches (though, you could easily see implied, they could of course have Meyer if they wanted).

Just as Heidel felt getting close to Bayern was the hurtful thing, the present sense of futility chips away at one – even a neutral – after an afternoon like this. An afternoon on which, as with Bayern’s recent comeback win over Hoffenheim and Serge Gnabry, the opposition’s best player already belongs to the champions. And Goretzka was, as Heidel acknowledged at full-time, “very, very good”.

Robert Lewandowski and Leon Goretzka. Photograph: Johannes Simon/Bundesliga/DFL via Getty Images

As Süddeutsche Zeitung wrote, Heidel’s further comment that Goretzka “in no way treated it like it was a special game” was further comment in itself on his mentality, and “expressly meant as praise”. Goretzka may not be a Schalke youth product, having signed from Bochum as an 18-year-old with a season of second-tier football under his belt, but he carries many of the hallmarks of a player shaped by these prodigious developers of youth. First and foremost is his steely nerve, reminiscent of Julian Draxler.

From next season, that beguiling package will belong to Bayern, as they continue Karl-Heinz Rummenigge’s project to bring down the squad’s average age. Even if Arturo Vidal, eulogised by Salihamidzic as “the outstanding player on the pitch”, is squeezing every last drop out of his Bayern career, he may be one of the casualties.

It was an afternoon when Bayern’s future felt ever more secure, with Neuer’s back-up Sven Ulreich – who has had a quietly outstanding season after a shaky start – inking a new contract to 2021. We might have had a closer call had it not been for a pair of mistakes by his opposite number Ralf Fährmann, who might have done better with Thomas Müller’s shot than allow Lewandowski to gobble up the rebound and score for the 11th straight Bundesliga home match, equalling his coach Jupp Heynckes’ record from 1987. Heynckes was absent with flu, with assistant Peter Hermann directing operations from the touchline, but would have been buoyed be Müller’s winner, beautifully constructed and sneaked inside Fährmann’s near post.

“We saw against Bayern that the team has what it takes,” said Heidel. For the top four, certainly, with Schalke only two points off the Champions League places, even after a third defeat in five. Really, though, we saw that Goretzka has what it takes and that, for the neutral, is perhaps the most concerning thing of all.

Talking points

• Also on Bayern’s future, three cheers for Hoffenheim’s Julian Nagelsmann, who raised €1,500 for a youth welfare charity in Sinsheim by auctioning “my relatively famous red coat”, as he put it – the one he had worn on a trip to the Allianz Arena which had appeared to many like a rather overenthusiastic nailing of his colours to the mast. Nagelsmann had a good weekend on the pitch too, with Hoffe beating Mainz 4-2, thanks to an Andrej Kramaric brace.

• It’s becoming clearer and clearer that Borussia Dortmund couldn’t have picked a better Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang substitute than Michy Batshuayi, who even celebrated his opener in the win over Hamburg – his third in two games – with a pastiche somersault. There was also the boost of Marco Reus’s return, and he later gave way to friend Mario Götze, who came on to score a stylish second. These were, however, isolated high points in another fairly ordinary performance, though Hans-Joachim Watzke praised the work of Peter Stöger and said the club would be “stupid” not to keep him if results held up.

Michy Batshuayi celebrates with a Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang-style somersault. Photograph: Friedemann Vogel/EPA

• A missed opportunity for Bayer Leverkusen who, four days after their rousing DfB Pokal quarter-final comeback win over Werder Bremen, didn’t get away with handing Hertha Berlin a two-goal lead. They also drew the short straw in Sunday’s draw for the last four, getting a home tie with Bayern.

• The other match-up is Schalke against Eintracht Frankfurt, and Niko Kovać’s side rose to fourth by beating Köln. The bottom club’s upturn under Stefan Ruthenbeck shouldn’t mask the fact they’re still deep in trouble, especially with strugglers Werder Bremen netting a second straight win, in some style, over Wolfsburg, and with Stuttgart edging Borussia Mönchengladbach.