My mother told me a story recently about her friend’s young son who has autism. He finds it difficult to make friends and to concentrate at school, so this year his dad signed him up for his first season of football. After a few weeks his social skills had already improved; he was becoming more patient and better at working in groups.

As they were getting ready to go to training earlier this week, they got the news that all grassroots football had been postponed due to the coronavirus pandemic. Heartbroken, the boy picked up his brand-new size-5 ball and shuffled off to his room. He fell asleep with his boots and his shin-pads still on.

There’s been a lot of talk over the past week about what football means and why it matters. Even though sport itself has ground to a halt, the columns (including this one) have rolled onward.

Who cares, some have asked, about sport – this thing that amounts to little more than a pageant of characters moving across a stage made of grass or wood or water – in ‘times like these’? What will sport look like once the curtains and the ropes fall away? To whom does sport turn if its audience’s priorities are hastily, maybe irreversibly, rearranged? How will we keep the lights on?

There, at least, lies one of sport’s rapidly-shrinking offerings: a space where we can have these conversations. Ironically, it’s in sport’s collapse that its true value – and the value of all things, really – is being honestly discussed. We’ve oscillated from sport meaning everything to sport meaning nothing, and now we’ve landed somewhere in between: where meaning and value is relative, where things can be unimportant globally but still matter, sometimes profoundly so, to you.

Saturday afternoon’s W-League final between Melbourne City and Sydney FC was, for 90 minutes, that conversation. In the grand scheme of things, as captains Steph Catley and Teresa Polias said in the days leading into it, this game didn’t matter. Compared to the world outside, playing a game and winning a trophy doesn’t matter. And while many have used the image of empty grandstands as a metaphor for sport’s ultimate superfluousness, there is an inverse meaning to be found in this stripping-away of the colour and noise. Rather than show us why football doesn’t matter in this global crisis, the W-League final – the thing on the pitch – showed us exactly why it does.

For while the usually-heaving AAMI Park was empty after Football Federation Australia’s behind-closed-doors ruling, you could still hear the gasps and the shouts of encouragement from the specially-invited family and friends scattered behind the benches. You could still see the reserve players pausing their warm-ups to applaud their team-mates for solid tackles and clever one-twos. And while regular fans were banned from the stadium, you could still watch them congregate elsewhere; organising online watch-parties and group chats from their various rooms in their various cities, isolated but not alone.

This is one possible silver lining to football’s global shutdown: the 2019-20 W-League final could be one of the most-watched Australian women’s club games ever.

Guardian Australia’s liveblog tracked viewers not just around the country but around the planet, from the US and the UK to South Africa, Nigeria and India. What they saw, though, wasn’t the “product” that professional football has become; the waves of branded fans, the glamorous stadium, the slick studio productions, the celebrity pundits. Instead, they saw football distilled: 22 people, two teams, one ball. It was football as we love and remember it; football on a Sunday morning in a quiet suburb, the pitch still shimmering with dew.

It was two groups running around, buoyed by the cheers of those who love them from the sidelines. It was team-mates rushing to celebrate the goal-scorer and rushing to comfort the error-prone keeper. It was the players collapsing in devastation and in delight, the collecting of medals from the table, and figuring out where to crouch for the group photo so that everybody can be seen. It was the line from the losing team’s captain that “I would lose with [this team] a thousand times if that’s what it takes.”

During these 90 minutes, regardless of who won or lost, 22 women on a pitch in Australia provided an answer to football’s existential question. Football’s meaning is amplified, not diminished, in times like these; not because it distracts us from what matters but because it reminds us that what matters is each other.

When you strip it back to its bones, this game has always been about people working together to achieve some common purpose. That is, perhaps, how sport best fits into a world currently reckoning with its own failure to do just that. So even though the business of football might not survive, the meaning of it will live on, so long as there’s a group of people with a ball at their feet or a boy who falls asleep with his boots on.