Talk about a flashback.

Watching the United State national team play El Salvador at Estadio Cuscatlan on Saturday was like going back 20 years. Or more.

Imagine, if you will, my fellow sports scribes, past and present, an environment where all of the following are unavailable:

–A press box.

–Electricity.

–Internet access of any sort.

–Video replay. Neither on television nor on stadium message board.

–Radio description of the game.

–No quote sheets. No statistics. No printed starting lineup for the visiting team.

–No translator for the opposing team and coach.

–And no guaranteed seats anywhere inside a packed stadium.

A couple of generations ago, that would not have been a scenario sports scribes would consider massively exotic. Not below the major professional league level. Many high school events still have many of those handicaps.

In 2009, however, going to work with none of the above in our favor, it was a test for the traveling American reporting contingent. Both of us.

Andrea Canales of goal.com and I were the only American journos at the match, if you don’t count ESPN’s camera and announcing crew.

No press box? A hassle. It would be nice to be separated from the crowd. No power? Well, with no press box, that’s an issue, and a fairly significant one, if your laptop doesn’t have a strong battery.

No internet connection? That’s an issue now, a big one, because it keeps us from seeing other scores or finding some live video of the match before us. Oh, and we can’t file a story.

Another major handicap, one that forced us to use mental “muscles” that had atrophied, was the lack of visual replay of events.

Soccer is a fast and flowing game. Perhaps only ice hockey exceeds it in speed and in the suddenness of a goal being scored.

Modern reporters depend heavily, almost to the point of helplessness, on instant replays seen in the press box, to cover sports such as soccer, hockey and football. Even basketball.

What really happened, down there, 100 yards from where we are sitting? We saw it. But how many details are we sure about? And does that certainty hold up when our one colleague recalls a different player making a pass, a different defender missing a tackle, the ball going off the keeper’s fingertips?

A soccer match might have — let’s guess — a thousand passes and maybe 40 or 50 semi-interesting moves toward the goal. But only a fraction of those passes and thrusts result in goals.

Thus, you are semi-sedated into watching the flow of a game rather than the specifics of ball movement. It requires significant attention to the field — and an ability to ignore screaming fans, persistent vendors and flying debris — to have a decent idea of what is happening. “He had it, then he had it, and finally he had it.”

And when a goal finally happens, in the blink of an eye, it often is difficult to reconstruct what happened. Putting the writer on the scene at a severe disadvantage with his or her reader, who is sitting in front of a TV that shows that same goal from 4-5 vantage points, at various speeds.

We are left to write stories in which we know far less about a goal happened than do our readers.

How to combat that? Andrea and I reverted to a couple of time-tested (but ancient) methods.

First, we checked with each other. That was No. 11 who made the cross, right? And it was Pearce he got past? And that was Califf who was behind No. 10? And the goal came from, what, 12 yards out?

You would be surprised (but cops and prosecutors perhaps would not be) by how often we, eyewitness, disagreed on fairly basic events. Andrea was sure there was a missed tackle in there, and a deflection. I was almost certain there was no tackle and no deflection. It would have helped if another 2-3 reporters had been there, to help us form a consensus.

The height of our troubles came on the second U.S. goal. Landon Donovan knocked a corner kick into a mob in front of goal, and the ball went into the net. Who headed it in? The PA gave no indication. It was difficult to tell from the players’ reaction. There was no knot of players around any one guy. No one running a lap of the stadium and sliding on his knees with fists clenched. All we saw was Frankie Hejduk running over to the sideline, alone, to celebrate with teammates, but would he do that in any case? He was playing on the side of the field next to the team benches.

So did Frankie score the goal? Was it his long-haired head that got on Donovan’s pass? Could we have missed those tresses redirecting the ball?

We thought it was a goal by Frankie. Were fairly sure. But we didn’t know for sure until after the match, when we could ask U.S. team members.

That is the second method for getting events correct in a media black hole — going to the participants for help in reconstructing events. This usually will settle things. But not always.

I made a point of talking to U.S. captain Carlos Bocanegra, a central defender, about the two goals scored by El Salvador. Bocanegra was there, on the field … and he could not accurately reconstruct who did what to whom. Three times, he told me, “I haven’t seen a replay. I’m really not sure.” (So until I see tape of those goals, I still won’t be able to say with certainty how the ball got from the flank and into the net.)

Should we have been better at this than we were? Just because we were sitting in the stands, with no TV, no internet, no replay and no power … should we have been more certain, the trained observers that we are, with hundreds of soccer games on our resumes?

Probably so. Because that’s how sports journalists would have had to do it in the past. Before replay. Before the web.

But long years of seeing an event, and then using/needing replay to confirm (or, often, radically correct) what our eyes told us … perhaps that made us less effectual than we should have been.

I’m not really sure. Maybe the only way to know about this is to have a hundred modern sports journalists cover hockey or soccer or an NFL game, and sit 100 yards from either goal, with no replay and no internet … and see how close to accuracy they come. It is tougher than most might think, of that I am sure. Maybe not so tough that our forebears would be defeated by it, but I can’t imagine it ever was easy, and I wonder how many “absolute” facts down through the ages were just mistakes that became etched in stone — without video to correct them.