How will future fans look back at Bangladesh's rise?

We live in an era that increasingly fetishises nostalgia. Retro is cool, old is new and the ideologies of hipsterism and new masculinity are based around the rejection of the modern. From movies to TV shows (all of which seem to have reduced their creativity to just reminding you of your childhood - remakes, sequels and comic book adaptations: welcome to the height of creativity) to right-wing talking heads, the magnificence of the past grows with every passing day. It's an era that makes it easy for sport - forever defined by nostalgia - to become part of the pop-culture landscape.

But sport struggles with a dichotomy. Whereas in, say, music whatever you were listening to at 16 will always be the greatest thing ever (and new music gets worse with each passing week, of course) sports fans have different eras to draw upon.

Jonathan Wilson once argued that the greatest period for your team was five years before you started watching it. I'd add to that the period when you were in your tweens. Nothing makes sport or sportsmen look more glorious than watching it with 12-year-old eyes (disclaimer: neither the writer nor the website endorse the purchase of 12-year-old eyes). But sport, unlike art, can be judged quantifiably, and is forever tied to the Olympian ideal of higher, faster and stronger.

Thus we come to an era where everything is worse than it was "back when I was a kid", and yet, over just the past decade, in nearly every single major sport there has been one individual or team referred to as the greatest of all time.

In every discipline of sport, with technological advances, improvements in (legal and illegal) medicine, and uber-professionalisation, the skill sets and physical state of the very best players keep getting better. But we still can't reconcile it with our inherent biases regarding sporting nostalgia; and this characterises every debate where a comparison across eras is made. This is what has defined fandom for many a generation past.

I've been thinking a lot about this recently. Not merely because of the festival of mediocrity that was the Ashes, and the plethora of high-quality programming that comes with it, but also because of the loss of myth-making it seemed to signal: an era when figures of 8 for 15 aren't considered worth writing paeans about to the extent they might have been in the past.

I grew up listening to tales of the Pakistani team of the '70s, where everyone from Nos. 1 to 11 was nothing short of heroic. Even after reading my uncle's stash of the Cricketer (Urdu) magazines from the late-'70s, which referred to these superheroes as ordinary players, deriding and lambasting them on every other page, I wasn't swayed. Nor when my brother brought home a VHS tape of the West Indies tour to Australia in 1984-85 and we found out that Clive Lloyd's team wasn't filled with demons and titans but mere mortals.

It wasn't until I was in my teens, when I saw footage of Imran Khan bowl in the 1982-83 series against India, that the images finally shattered. In my mind he ought to have been Buraq on roids, at the very least, to have lived up to the billing he had in the countless Wasim-Imran debates I had been a part of. Hell, anything short of him running in with a cape around his neck would probably have been a disappointment. For many, Imran remains exactly that, his achievements growing ever greater with every passing year, his greatest fans now those who never saw him play.

Over the past few years, Bangladesh have finally graduated to the mainstream. Despite what oft-referenced commenters would argue, the vast majority of neutral cricket fans root for them - the success of a likeable new lot in a sport that tries really hard to remain as small as possible is a pretty logical movement to back. And proof of their progress is not in their World Cup results nor the series wins, it's in how their achievements are now undermined because they occurred at home - a hallmark of a big Asian side if ever there was one.

But the world in which Bangladesh have joined the big boys is vastly different to all that came before them. The last Asian team to make the leap was Sri Lanka. Despite four years of progress their victory in the World Cup was still a shock, their methods new to everyone.

Now, if Bangladesh were to devise an innovative strategy it would be dissected not only by other teams but by the hordes of cricket nerds who populate the new cricket world (or people "outside cricket", as some would refer to them).

Once, greatness was explained in the words of the radio commentator or in the match report - the imagery was left to the fan's imagination; myths were created at whim and spread around with no one to fact-check. Now, all you need are Google and Wikipedia. With the exception of AB de Villiers, myth-making is a dead sport. And it's easy to see why.

Sixty years on from his retirement no one is really sure how fast Fazal Mahmood bowled, yet Mustafizur Rahim has been deconstructed within a month or so of his debut. Shakib Al Hasan, in stories, could be Sobers magnified, but his numbers will be there for all to see.

With the rise of profile pages and Statsguru, the realm of numbers has moved from the last pages of magazines to the fingertips of whoever has an argument to win. Thus when Bangladeshis who have witnessed this ascent are to tell the tale to future generations, how much myth-making can they do in the era of YouTube and instant access? Why would a Bangladeshi father tell his son of Rubel Hossain running in from the boundary, breaking toes and heads, when the son has the ability to watch every single over from Rubel with just a click?

Bangladesh will be a case study in how fandom works and evolves in the 21st century, although the retort in the end will be how fandom in the 20th century was so much better, purer even. Some things will never change.