AC Milan was struggling in last week’s Champions League game. Turkey’s Fenerbahce had come to Milan’s huge 70,000-capacity San Siro stadium looking for a tie, and with the score at 1-1 and only three minutes left in the game, it looked like mission accomplished for the Turks.

All it took was a few seconds, and the mission was wrecked. A few seconds of rare soccer magic from Milan’s Brazilian forward, Kaka, who powered his way through a midfield challenge, swerved out to his right, dribbled intricately past two more Turkish defenders, cut inside, had the time and the confidence to take a quick look at the Turkish goalkeeper’s position, and then blasted a 25-yard rocket into the net.

Relief for the Milan fans, applause and cheers for Kaka – of course. But something more. Something so rare in the modern game. A whole stadium rising to its feet to roar out a sustained ovation for the sheer wonder of a fantastic goal.

“Only Kaka is capable of doing something like that in the modern game,” said Milan coach Carlo Ancelotti. An exaggeration, but not by much – Ronaldinho, and the youngster Robinho, have it in them. Like Kaka, they are Brazilians.

But Ancelotti made another comment that is worth some thought.Kaka’s goal, he said, “was like a goal from another era.” Not typical of the modern game, then – we don’t see that type of goal nowadays.

That is the truth. Of course, goals featuring sustained individual brilliance were never an everyday feature of the game, but in that “other era” there were enough players around who were capable of such scoring feats. Their mere presence added excitement to the sport, the thrill of anticipation, the expectation of something dramatic waiting to happen.

By and large, the sport of soccer has lost that particular thrill. Ancelotti is right: it belonged to another era. Are today’s players are less skillful? Not at all. But the game has changed over the past three decades, and has become a much more defense-dominated sport.

Better put, I should say that the game has been allowed to change in ways that have squeezed the brilliant individual performances to the margins.

There are the obvious factors. Players today are fitter and better trained. They run faster, they jump higher, they cover more ground, meaning soccer fields seem smaller than they used to. There is less space for dribbling, so defenders find it easier to double mark. And the coaches, ever busy at work devising negative tactics, have managed to convince everyone that the keys to real soccer are defensive strength and team play.

But it is this last factor, really a change in mentality, that has been most damaging to soccer’s attempts to maintain its place as Pele’s “Beautiful Game.” The new mentality, incredible as it may seem, is that it is perfectly acceptable for defenders to ignore the rules of the game when confronted by a tricky, dazzling opponent.

The hell with all that fancy footwork, just knock him down.

Now, that ought to be stupid advice because the referee is supposed to punish that sort of thing – he might even eject a player for a rough tackle. But chances are high that the defender will get away with it. Maybe he gives up a free kick, but that’s all. The dreaded dribbler has been stopped in his tracks, the defending team is given time to regroup.

Confronted with what almost sounds like a widespread conspiracy to put dribblers out of business at any cost, who would want to be a dribbler? The attitude that it’s okay to foul carries a physical threat of real danger to life and limb. In 2002, the teenaged Robinho put on a sparkling dribbling display against Brazilian league foe Gremio. The Gremio goalkeeper, Danrlei, later told the press: “Players get angry when they get dribbled all the time. He could end up having his leg broken.” Danrlei claimed that he was merely alerting Robinho, but many saw it as a threat.

Working more insidiously against the dribbler is the undeniable fact that he is not admired, or wanted, by most modern coaches. He is accused of slowing the game down, and of course of running counter to the “it’s a team game” theme so beloved by today’s coaches.

Under those conditions, is it any wonder that there is a shortage of dribblers? It is not an encouraging thing to attend youth games and hear coaches constantly shouting “Pass the ball!” Just occasionally, a kid will be encouraged to “Take him on!” But even that may be asking for trouble, because of the reluctance of referees to call fouls. Ben Boehm, a well-known coach with the Gottschee youth club of Queens, complaining that a referee was allowing his players to be mercilessly kicked, was told not long ago: “Well, they’re inviting it. They’re dribbling too much.”

The miracle is that some dribblers – like Kaka – do manage to survive. The sport could do with a lot more Kakas, and a lot fewer dreary defensive coaches. But at the moment, this is the situation: Soccer is knowingly depriving itself of a whole category of its most brilliant players along with the tremendous excitement they bring.

It should be quite easy to reverse this trend with a rule change mandating that defenders are shown zero tolerance. Those who cynically foul attacking players must be assured a swift and severe punishment. A yellow card must be the standard referee response, with the red card being used much more frequently.

I say it should be easy. But it won’t be. Firstly, referees have a history of favoring defenders, and have always managed to water down into halfhearted practice the rules that have been so sternly set out on paper. (The dangerous tackle from behind is the perfect example. Supposedly “banned” by a rule change over 10 years ago, it survives quite nicely, is a feature of every game, and frequently goes unpunished.)

Secondly, FIFA, the guardians of the game, seem totally unconcerned with the direction it is taking. President Sepp Blatter recently announced the formation of a new Task Force for the Good of the Game. The group has a list of worthy targets it will look into, things like multiple club ownership, doping, discrimination, corruption, and betting.

But it will not deal with the direction that the game has taken on the field. So soccer will continue to be deprived of a former glory, and it will far too rarely witness moving scenes of fans in a crowded stadium rising spontaneously to applaud the real beauty of the game.