Finn Russell, Gaël Fickou, Jamie Ritchie et al laid on an all-action skill-fest so superior to the previous day’s Wales versus England slog-athon that it might have been an entirely different sport.

The Paris classic also, to my mind, enhanced the case for a radical rule-change that first flickered into my thoughts a good five or six years ago.

In recent times, the ever-increasing size and athleticism of elite practitioners of a game whose professional era began only comparatively recently has resulted in space being at more and more of a premium - at least so it seems to me, a keen but very much part-time spectator.

Less space means less time and - except perhaps for the extraordinarily gifted - less scope for creativity.

I would argue that this trend has tended to make a game - which, at its best, can take the breath away - less appealing on the eye, with the bludgeon gaining ground over the rapier as an attacking option.

For five or six decades now, rugby union has been as adventurous as any sport I can think of when it comes to promulgating and embracing rule-changes - partly because it has had to be.

This in turn probably makes armchair-critics such as myself more inclined to think out of the box.

And so it occurred to me, when mulling how to recoup a little bit of space for the Russells and Bennetts and Gibsons who have always been the game’s glory, that one way of achieving this would be to reduce the number of players on either side.

Turning rugby union into a 14-a-side affair would be tantamount to cutting on-field personnel by less than seven per cent. Yet the fraction of a second here and there which such a change would yield might make all the difference to those flair players who need to prosper if the sport is significantly to broaden its appeal in the face of the soccer juggernaut.

This brings me back to Sunday’s wondrous encounter.

Two early red cards - first for Scotland’s Grant Gilchrist, then for Mohamed Haouas of France - reduced the teams quite by chance to 14 men each.

And what a pulsating feast of running rugby they duly produced. I cannot prove that the action would have been any less enthralling if played out with the usual 15 men per team - but it was a sensational advertisement for the sort of fare that 14-a-side rugby union is capable of serving up.

I suppose that the increasing onus on player safety might well mean that this sort of thing happens more frequently in any case, at least until players fully adjust to new realities.

But for every game that ends up 14-a-side, I fear that three or four will be ruined as contests by obliging one team to soldier on for long stretches, in what is a physically hyper-demanding sport, with a player less than their opponents.

One argument that might be raised against a permanent switch to a 14-a-side game is that by moving from eight to seven forwards, you imbalance the scrum.

Sunday showed that this need not be the case - the back row is simply reduced to two flankers. This would admittedly signal the extinction of the number eight role. Yet if the upshot was significantly more matches resembling this France-versus-Scotland epic, I would regard it as a sacrifice worth making.

So free-flowing was the play in the French capital in any case that I do not think there was a set scrum until the 38^th minute, nearly half-time, though they became more frequent later.

I cannot immediately think of any sport that has adjusted the number of players per team in the way I am suggesting.

Many, though, rugby included, have altered their respective points-scoring systems, and, in its early days, cricket used to permit what was perceived as the weaker team to field more than 11 players as a means of evening up the contest.

I am sure purists will hate the idea, but Sunday’s compelling masterpiece constitutes to these eyes at least a pretty strong argument for making the switch to a 14-a-side game, perhaps initially on an experimental basis.