Feeding a couple of million hungry kids only buys you so much time when people decide you turned your back on a half-chance against Aston Villa. Football has a shorter memory than ever for good things, as Marcus Rashford discovered last week.
Praise turns to indifference, and then resentment, and then hostility, and then abuse, before you have time to blink.
It is not that the work Rashford did during lockdown, pressuring a reluctant government to extend the provision of free meals and activities to low-income families during school holidays, should earn him special treatment on the pitch.