There are plenty of things you shouldn't do at 17, and some the fun police won't allow you to do, but there are few things of which you should be theoretically incapable. Federico Macheda's debut goal was one. This was not some meaty long-range hit or an adrenaline-fuelled solo run, but a goal so aware and accomplished that it evoked the absolute pomp of a master finisher such as Jean-Pierre Papin. (Or, more pertinently, his reserve-team coach Ole Solskjaer, who scored many similar goals.) Six weeks on, it still blows the mind that a 17-year-old, on debut, could do such a thing at such a critical time.

A day earlier, at Fulham, Liverpool had coolly presented a straight flush in the shape of Yossi Benayoun's injury-time winner; now United, and Macheda, showed them a royal flush, sending the title race decisively back in their favour. And it was all done by a kid. Not a fresh-faced one, admittedly – not since Arjen Robben became a man has there been an older-looking 17-year-old – but a kid nonetheless. In an increasingly cynical sport, this was, at the risk of assuming the position atop the Guardian Pomposity & Pontification Throne, a reminder of why we fell in love with football in the first place. Even Sky's Martin Tyler, a calm man who has seen pretty much everything in his commentary career, lost it.

There is a glib assumption that Macheda is heading right for the top, but the cases of others who have scored famous goals at a young age or on debut – Mark Robins, Josimar, even Michael Owen – suggest that might not be the case. Yet whether Macheda plays seven games for Manchester United or 700, he will always be an Old Trafford legend.

Sir Alex Ferguson can talk until he's blue in the face, or red in the nose, about how this scoreline was unjust, but he doth protest far too much. Ferguson, like everyone else involved, knows that when it comes to contests as tribal as Manchester United versus Liverpool, everything but the scoreline is superfluous. This was an absolute tousing, one that neither side will ever forget. Seeing Rio Ferdinand and Nemanja Vidic, a pair who ordinarily ooze certainty, reduced to nervous wrecks by Liverpool's devastating counter-attacks was surreal enough, like watching a bomb disposal expert with the shakes, but that had nothing on the shambling joke that is Andrea Dossena outpacing John O'Shea in the snail race to lob the fourth. It was the final straw on a day of numbing indignity for United – a day that you suspect, behind closed doors at least, turned Ferguson the deepest shade of purple.

There have been umpteen outstanding goals this season – Carlton Cole's winner at Wigan for one – but none had the sheer majesty of Abou Diaby's strike at Villa Park, which fused sublime skill, 21st‑century athleticism and Zen-like calm. It began with a Redondo turn on Curtis Davies and, after the sort of imperious, leggy and deceptively quick stride that could make grown men go weak at the knees, ended with a coolly emphatic clip into the net. We're not exactly sure what else he did all season, apart from another regal finish at Newcastle, but when he scores goals this good we'll let him off.

Many a tackle has turned the course of a game, but Phil Neville's on Cristiano Ronaldo turned a whole season. It's easy to forget, so adroitly and unobtrusively did this most admirable of teams regroup after the blessing in disguise of an early European elimination, but Everton were a desperate mess at the start of the season: short on players (look at their foetal bench for the first Premier League game) and haemorrhaging goals.

In the eight games before they faced United, they took eight points and conceded 18 goals. That's the same number they have conceded in the 28 games since Neville's tackle, a zesty, calculated, ball-and-man reducer for which he was booked, catalysed a rousing 1-1 draw against the champions that enabled Everton to stop the bleeding. At that stage they were 14th in the table, but within a week they were seventh and have not dropped out of the top half since. The tackle even has its own Facebook group, and enabled Neville to win over a genuinely sceptical home crowd. But it was the effect on the collective rather than the personal that was most important.

Rafael Benítez facting up against Sir Alex Ferguson was entertainingly hamfisted stuff, but Liverpool's storming end to the season means that the final verdict on whether it was a success – and if you go after the king, you best not miss – has been postponed until the end of next season. Not so with Joe Kinnear's legendary rant at the press in October, which famously contained 52 cusswords in five minutes. At one stage he was rattling along so well that you thought Joe 90 might soon have a new meaning. The verdict may not be in as to whether the Daily Mirror's Simon Bird is indeed "a cunt", as Kinnear suggested in the best opening gambit in history, but we do now know that he was more than justified in railing against the widespread sniggering that followed his appointment as Newcastle's interim manager, when he was belittled by almost everybody as a dinosaur with what looked dangerously like a bleach rinse gone wrong.

Kinnear often wore the befuddled look of a man who pressed the wrong button in the DeLorean, and the Charles Insomnia episode was a gem, but he knows how to manage football teams. While he was in charge, Newcastle took 20 points from 18 league games (a safety-securing 42 points pro rata); without him they have managed 14 from 19 (or 28 from 38 games). More than that, however, his outburst was gloriously funny, in a way that only someone completely misplacing their rag can be. Everyone will have their favourite bit; ours is a pause that Jack Benny could not have judged better between "What are you, my personal secretary?" and the devastatingly subtle punchline: "Fuck off".

Who wouldn't want to be Brian Clough? He was a genius, he was immensely charismatic, and he played who-blinks-first with booze on a daily basis. Most of us realise that we can't be Brian Clough, however, and so concentrate on that last bit. Phil Brown, does things the other way round. The problem with that is that Clough managed on instinct, a privilege afforded a blessed few, whereas Brown comes across as a phony who has spent too much time with his £2.99 "How To Be Like Brian Clough" set from Woolworths. Holden Caulfield would have had a field day with him.

Brown's desire to be a maverick manager has manifested itself in umpteen displays of ostentatious eccentricity throughout the season, most notably and infamously at Eastlands on Boxing Day when, with his side 4-0 down at half-time, he decided that you didn't need a dressing room for a dressing-down and instead kept the players on the pitch. It backfired spectacularly, and the perception was that Brown lost the dressing room without even being in it. Some people are on the pitch, they think it's all over ... Hull's season pretty much was: they were sixth at the time, but have won only a single game since. One other thing: whether for charity or not, Clough would never, ever have worn that beard.