Just a quick glance over the hedge of social media reveals a field of GOATs as far as the eye can see.
The acronym crops up time and again in comments sections and social media posts in the wake of sporting spectacles and feverish discussions over the ranks of the greats.
Lionel Messi was already regarded as part of the pantheon before his fairytale World Cup triumph.
For the last remaining doubters though (a footballing rogues' gallery of sorts as Second Captains' Ken Early playfully put it), the prospect of being one of football's GOATs (Greatest of All Time) - if not the standout one - fits much more snugly around his shoulders after the dramatic events on Sunday. Needless to say, there will still be a few hold-outs against the narrative.
Certainly, winning the World Cup, and as some have phrased it, "completing football" by winning every available club and international honour in inimitable style, carves him out as the best player of this generation and onto the Mount Rushmore of the sport.
Whether he is at the very summit above Pele, Diego Maradona and other luminaries like Ferenc Puskas and Johan Cruyff is another matter entirely and a debate that is more at the mercy of the generational game.
From memory, for a child of the '90s, it always seemed that the name most verbalised as being football's greatest of all time was Pele, whether that was from the media authorities of the day or the elders who populated Leitrim and further afield.
Yet in the last 20 years or so, Diego Maradona's star began to shine just as brightly and then even appeared to surpass his fellow South American icon in the stratosphere as the clock ticked forward.
That is a testament to the strongest prevailing winds in each era. Those who overlapped with the late 1950s to early '70s would become the dominant voices and scribes pushing the case for Pele.
But arriving in from the next generation were those who hadn't lived what came before and couldn't help but be captivated by the compelling case of Maradona.
Given the longevity of Messi, those of this writer's generation - born in the span between the early-80s and late '90s - already have a couple of fingers wrapped around the megaphone and the clamour for the status of the Rosario native will only amplify as their voices reverberate louder and louder, before future generations grab control of the volume button with their contemporary GOAT candidates.
In truth the debate is both fun and pointless all at once. The context and challenges of each era tend to be lost on the next generations and so on and so forth.
A sport like Formula One highlights that impossibility of identifying a single all-time great more than most given the difficulty of fully separating the strengths of the car from the driver behind the wheel. That's without mentioning just how distinct each era was from the ones that preceded and followed in terms of depth of competition, danger and the extent of the calendar.
That's probably where a food pyramid style structure might come in handy to divide candidates into the fairest of categories, with the likes of Juan Manuel Fangio, Jim Clark, Alain Prost, Ayrton Senna, Michael Schumacher, Lewis Hamilton, and (on the proviso that he continues in his current form over an extended period) Max Verstappen sitting together in the sugary section at the top, above the next cast of greats who in turn sit above the next batch of drivers and so on so forth.
What's clear is that those in the very top tier - Senna and Prost aside - had a clear run at cementing their status over their generational rivals. But all the aforementioned names have made compelling cases to be included at that level whether it be stylistically or statistically.
And that is probably the more sobering way of settling football's GOAT generation game with Pele, Maradona and Messi congealed together as the cream of the crop, gnawing softly at the collective heartstrings whilst keeping the gate open for the kids of the future.
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