Radio 4’s Today presenters have never had a particularly happy time talking about cricket, and their relationship with the sport threatened to hit a low this week. Sarah Montague, interviewing a pair of self-confessed obsessives on the subject of Ben Stokes’s incredible feats in the Cape Town Test, was hearing how hard it was to keep up the record books in an era when such big hitting is becoming par for the course. “Dare I suggest we ditch the records?” she asked, blasphemously. To which her alarmed interviewee replied: “Steady on!”

The sound of spoons hitting cereal bowls no doubt chimed in harmony in the kitchens of cricket anoraks all over the country. To be fair, you can see where Montague was coming from. The events of the past week were extraordinary enough – besides Stokes’s efforts, there was the news that a Mumbai schoolboy had reset the world’s highest individual score, and that his scarcely credible 1,009 not out had smashed the previous total, which had stood for 117 years, by 357 runs.

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But the whole of the previous year was an astonishing one. Unprecedented occurrences have streaked across our TV screens like the blazing meteorites that heralded the end of the dinosaurs. There was AB de Villiers’ 31-ball hundred against West Indies in Johannesburg, the fastest ever ODI century, and one he followed up with an unprecedented 64-ball 150 against the same opponents two months later. At the World Cup, Martin Guptill set the tournament’s largest ever score (237); Kumar Sangakkara scored four consecutive centuries; and Chris Gayle and Marlon Samuels managed a 372‑run partnership.

The pace of cricket is quickening. The game’s fans are witnessing the liveliest spell of record-breaking since Simon Pegg and Nick Frost attacked zombies with their vinyl collection in Shaun of the Dead. Perhaps it’s a valid fear that, as long-held achievements are trampled under the collective spikes of bullyboys raised on Twenty20’s super-energy diet, what remains in their wake loses meaning. After all, Spectre broke every British box-office record at the cinema last year, and it had Christoph Waltz saying “Cuckoo!” in it.

And yet, cricket’s enduring love of hard data has never seemed more suited to the zeitgeist. The internet has made anoraks of us all. You think BuzzFeed created the listicle? Ha! You dear naïf. Cricket-lovers were sorting stuff into infinitely spurious comparison columns before anyone had even thought of putting a cute hat on a kitten.

This is the age of information overload, of unlimited data. There’s a reason that Cricinfo existed before Facebook was a twinkle in Mark Zuckerberg’s eye. There’s a reason it had a searchable online database of every Test and ODI played before you’d even dreamed that Waitrose might one day deliver dried porcini to your door. Cricket’s statistical obsession had primed us for the computer age.

As the good book almost says, the geek shall inherit the Earth – and so it has come to pass that mainstream culture has embraced the nerd, the dork, the fanboy. Their passions have become ours, their worlds of pedantically guarded mythologies – from Star Wars to Doctor Who to Marvel’s comic book heroes – have consumed our culture. What is Wisden, if not cricket’s origin story, its Mahabharata and Iliad and Song of Fire and Ice all rolled into one? Who are its acolytes, if not followers of sport’s most niche yet enduring cult classic?

The historical records we monastically retain – from the august to the obscure – exist partly to keep us entertained during our game’s peculiar longueurs. But they’re not just whimsy – they’re also a way of understanding our place in the most illustrious of all sporting backstories. They’re what remind us of cricket’s ability to surprise, to shock, to create situations so extreme or bizarre that even a young spectator might shake their head and say, in wonder, “I’ll never see anything like it again”.

If we’re lucky, we’ll be wrong. The Victorian crowds who watched WG Grace rewrite history single‑handed, year on year, knew what it meant to see records tumble. It meant they were living through a golden age of their sport. And so are we. It’s a wonder Kevin Feige hasn’t announced a multi‑movie deal for Wisden already.

• This articles was corrected on 9 January 2016 to remove a reference to George Bailey’s 2013 feat of hitting Jimmy Anderson for 28 in an over, and to say that Ben Stokes’s innings was in Cape Town, not Durban