I n the build-up to the first major showpiece event of this season in English football – the League Cup final at Wembley – a significant bulk of the focus centred on the battle in attack. Chelsea vs Spurs: Diego Costa vs Harry Kane.

That the two could even be compared seemed strange, when you think about it. Here was a £32 million signing who tore up La Liga last season, fired his team to an unlikely title, smashing the Barcelona / Real Madrid duopoly in the process, helped Atletico Madrid reach the Champions League final and played in the World Cup. A cover star considered one of the world’s most lethal strikers.

In the white corner was Harry Kane – a rookie playing his first full season at the top level after loitering around the lower leagues on loan struggling to convince many he could ever make it at Spurs. A year ago, in the week Costa scored two goals against AC Milan to shatter their Champions League dreams, Kane was lining up for Spurs Under-21s against West Brom’s kids in the U21 Premier League.

It says a lot about Kane’s incredible evolution that the two were deemed comparable. But they were. Kane had 24 goals in all competitions – seven more than Costa – but three less in the Premier League. Five goals in Kane’s four league games since means the two are now joint-top scorers in the Premier League on 19 goals, with Kane leaving established world stars like Sergio Aguero and Radamel Falcao trailing in his wake.

The rise of Harry Kane has been the most astonishing and uplifting story in the Premier League this season. The 21-year-old former Ridgeway Rovers youth team player has scored 29 goals in all competitions for Spurs this season, making him the league’s overall best marksman. But the sheer quantity of goals only tells half the story. It’s the gravity of them that has proved so awe-inspiring, so thrilling.

A last minute winner against Aston Villa. Spurs’ opening goal in narrow wins over Hull, Swansea, Burnley and Leicester. Two goals and two assists in an astounding 5-3 win over Chelsea, a landmark moment in Kane’s coming of age. Two goals to drag Spurs from 1-0 down to 2-1 winners against the old enemy, Arsenal, in a north London derby that will be remembered at White Hart Lane for years to come.

“It’s my first north London derby and it was incredible,” Kane, a Spurs fan born in Walthamstow and raised in Chingford, said post-match. “I watched so many as a kid and the feeling now is one I can’t describe.” “Most of my family were Spurs fans and I grew up 15 minutes from the ground, so I was always going to be a Spurs fan,” Kane had said previously. “He’s one of our own,” the fans sing with glee.

The beauty of Kane’s rise is that these aren’t just icing-on-the-cake goals in routine wins. The 21-year-old is pound-for-pound the most important player in this season’s Premier League, his goals contributing directly to 22 points for Spurs, more than any other player by some distance. The pressure isn’t fazing Kane, either. He was called into the England squad for the first time last week. To celebrate, he scored a hat-trick against Leicester.

Called into action as a second half substitute against Lithuania at Wembley, Kane then topped it all by taking just 78 seconds to score his first international goal. The country watched on in awe. “It’s like Harry Kane’s life is being written and directed by 8-year-old Harry Kane,” wrote journalist Milana Knezevic on Twitter, nailing it perfectly. “Being English, and seeing someone like Harry and the way he’s playing this season, he’s having a stunning year,” David Beckham had previously raved.

Talk of Harry Kane dominated the build-up to England’s routine win over Lithuania, so for him to deliver within two minutes of coming on was staggering. It was also mission complete for part one of Kane’s career. As narrative arcs go, he’s hit the peak of phase one: the local boy come good, the heroic rise to fame, the goal on England debut. All the talk since has been about what happens next.

On Harry Kane and living in the moment

The list of players to score on their England debuts is long and contradictory. Among the Alan Shearers, the Bobby Charltons and the Jimmy Greaveses lie the likes of David Nugent, Kieran Richardson and Francis Jeffers, players who – though they should be commended for ever making it to international level – failed to make any lasting impression.

After England’s win, Twitter – ever the indicator of public opinion – was split, between those christening Harry Kane the next Messi, Maradona and Pele rolled into one and those urging caution or, worse, predicting he’d be knocking around in the Championship on loan within a few years. ‘Kane starts his pursuit of Bobby Charlton’s 49-goal record,” wrote Sam Wallace of the The Independent post-match, overstretching the moment quite wildly.

That very few people were able to just enjoy the moment for what it was was interesting to me. It seemed strange, almost sad, in a sense, that rather than simply experience this truly uplifting story and take it for what it is, we were keen to project and predict, whether positively or negatively.

As human beings, we have a stubborn and powerful collective inability to live in the moment. According to a major study carried out by psychologists at Harvard University in 2010, we spend 46.9 percent of our waking hours thinking about something other than what we’re doing. And it’s not actually good for us, affecting our mental wellbeing in a negative way.

In 2010, psychology professors Matthew A. Killingsworth and Daniel T. Gilbert of Harvard University developed an iPhone app that contacted 2,250 volunteers at random intervals to ask how happy they were, what they were currently doing, and whether they were thinking about their current activity or about something else that was pleasant, neutral, or unpleasant.

Subjects could choose from 22 general activities, such as walking, eating, shopping, and watching television, and, as it turned out, respondents reported that their minds were wandering 46.9 percent of time on average, and no less than 30 percent of the time during every activity except making love.

“A human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind,” Killingsworth and Gilbert wrote when publishing their findings in the journal Science. “The ability to think about what is not happening is a cognitive achievement that comes at an emotional cost.”

Apparently, unlike other animals, we humans spend far too much time thinking about events that happened in the past, or what might happen in the future, and forget to live in the moment. Entire books have been written about this concept of mindfulness, and while it’s a completely normal human reaction, it doesn’t do us much good.

“Many philosophical and religious traditions teach that happiness is to be found by living in the moment, and practitioners are trained to resist mind wandering and to ‘be here now,’” Killingsworth and Gilbert noted in Science. “These traditions suggest that a wandering mind is an unhappy mind.”

Enjoying Harry Kane

“Yeah, but what’s this got to do with Harry Kane?” you may be wondering at this point, mouse hovering menacingly over the ‘X’ button.

Rather than projecting where Kane goes from here, wondering whether he’ll break Sir Bobby Charlton’s record, go on to score 500 goals for Real Madrid or end up washed up at San Jose Earthquakes or Scunthorpe by age 25, featuring on sarcastically-penned lists of ‘Top 10 England debut goalscorers who ACHIEVED ABSOLUTELY NOTHING’, would it be so bad for us to just live in the moment, for a change?

The story of Harry Kane and his rise to international stardom has been blessed with a warmth about it that is quite rare in modern football, a feel-good factor largely unblighted by the bitterness of club rivalries or sinister tabloid potshots at his personality. He seems a nice, normal, likeable kind of guy, and that has undoubtedly helped. “I saw him receive an award recently at a charity dinner,” said Sir Geoff Hurst, a World Cup winner in 1966. “You could see how level-headed he is.”

In England, there’s a genuine feeling that he truly is one of our own. He grew up in the shadows, he grafted, he took the setbacks and worked even harder. He is every English kid who dreams of making it.

H ow long that feeling will last is anyone’s guess. The English media loves nothing more than to build a player up and then knock him down. The second part of that narrative, the nastier side, is surely lurking around the corner – Kane can’t continue in this vein of form forever (or can he?!).

It would be nice if, for once, we could simply enjoy Harry Kane for who he is and what he’s achieving right now, here, in the moment, rather than looking too far forward or back and worrying about what happens next or what might be.

“Be present in all things and thankful for all things,” Maya Angelou once said. What Harry Kane does next is for another day. It’s what he’s doing now that should be remembered and enjoyed.

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