The growing phenomenon of best-everism has reached truly worrying levels. In fact, we can now safely say it is an epidemic.

Barely a month goes by without a match being described as the best in recent memory. Sometimes, when pundits and scribblers run out of superlatives, it's even the best ever. The same knee-jerk superlatives are used for players and competitors: they're increasingly described as greats in their chosen sport, sometimes - when the well of adjectives has run dry - the greatest of them all.

The use of these absolutes - best and greatest and most memorable and unrivalled and peerless and unsurpassed - has become so over-used, so glibly applied, that the words have become almost meaningless. Or shorn of their original meaning anyway.

In the small world of AFL, that reckless use of the language is commonplace. Last year's round-14 match between St Kilda and Geelong was, by common reckoning, an epic. To some, however, it was the greatest home-and-away match ever.

The tendency to lily-gilding was on show again this week, in the wake of the AFL season's opening round.

There we were, 1/22nd of the way through the 2010 home-and-away season - or 4.54% of the way through that particular AFL race - when one or two commentators couldn't resist the urge to employ some early-season hyperbole. The pace at which the Collingwood-Bulldogs game was played in the first half was said to be among the most torrid and frenetic ever witnessed. Rarely, if ever, had the ball and the play moved at such speed.

In truth, this is a trend that started some years ago.

When Essendon's Gary Moorcroft took that spectacular mark over Footscray's Brad Johnson in 2001, even experienced commentators such as Bruce McAvaney tripped over themselves in trying to find the suitable superlative. They mostly settled on: the best ever.

When Essendon went through the 2000 season with just one defeat before pummeling Melbourne in the grand final, pundits were quick to hail them as, naturally, the best team ever. And for that season, they were mighty good, it is true. But ‘'best teams ever'' win more than one premiership - which is all the Dons ended up managing.

The mantle of ‘best team ever' was then passed to Brisbane - which at least had some claim to the title after winning three flags in a row - and then Geelong in 2007. But that was after they'd won just won premiership. And then they lost to Hawthorn in 2008 and, but for a bit of good fortune here and there, might easily have gone down to St Kilda last year.

Yep, two flags in three years in impressive, no doubt, but best ever? What about the Melbourne team in the late 50's that won five of six premierships? Or the Collingwopod team of the late 20s that snared four on the trot? Or the mighty Hawks of the 80s?

But the 1920s, 1950s? In the minds of some 30-year-old reporters, that's ancient history, that's pre-Stone Age, that doesn't count.

The phenomenon is not just confined to local sport. It can be found in some of the most august journals in the English-speaking world.

I've often heard Tiger Woods referred to as the greatest golfer ever. Never mind that he's still four majors behind Jack Nicklaus' tally of 18. But then Jack was doing his stuff in the 60s and 70s, when many in the golfing press box were yet to start pre-school.

The Guardian newspaper last month, in an analysis at odds with their normally sensible sports coverage, posed the question: ‘'Given his mastery of the game, is it time to consider Sachin Tendulkar the superior to Don Bradman?''

Which is plain silly on a range of levels. Bradman's Test average was 99.94; Tendulkar's 55.57. Bradman never played one-day cricket and may never have wanted to play Twenty20 but it's no great stretch of the imagination to assume his talents at the crease would been easily transferred to the shorter forms of the game. In short, a ridiculous Gen Y comparison.

When Rafael Nadal beat Roger Federer in their five-set clinker of a Wimbledon final in 2008, some observers simply couldn't restrain themselves.

The decades of great matches, and players, were airbrushed from the history books in an instant. For this was surely the greatest match ever. The man from BBC Sport - I'll save him the embarrassment of printing his name - began his match report thus: ‘'The men's 2008 Wimbledon final on Sunday is already being talked about as one of the best tennis matches, if not sporting encounters, in history.''

Phew. Now that's setting the bar at a whole new level.

I wonder what the spectators at other great sporting contests might have thought about that. The ones who filled the MCG in the last Saturday of September in 1970; the crowd who were at Lord's for the second Ashes Test in 1930 to see Bradman play what he regarded as his greatest innings; the small band of devotees who crammed into Sheffield's Crucible Theatre on April 28 of 1985*; or those at Madison Square Garden in 1995 when Michael Jordan dropped 55 points against the New York Knicks after his comeback.

Forgive this fossil for sounding like an old curmudgeon but I'd ask: where's the context, where's the nod to history, the acknowledgement that the guys and girls in the sepia-toned photos from 40 or even 60 years ago might have been pretty handy, too, and might even given their 21st-century successors a run for their money.

So the next time you hear or read about the greatest or best or most spectacular sporting contest, take it with a grain of salt. Invariably it won't be. It'll be just another better-than-average match that, in the grand scheme of things, will definitely be rivaled, surpassed and transcended - possibly even by next year.

(* a personal favourite, and one that may have deserved all the tributes that came its way.)