The Carabao Cup is like a stray dog turning up in the middle of a wedding: it’s weird, nobody can really explain why it’s there, it’s an unwelcome distraction from what you’d ideally like to be paying attention to, but it’s a huge amount of fun as long as nobody gets badly mauled.

In an age where football is so often treated with either po-faced tut-tutting or irritatingly overblown bombast, there is a lot to be said for a low-stakes competition that nobody could possibly take too seriously. Chelsea and Tottenham delivered a delightful reminder that when sport is not taken too seriously, it begins to look more like a game. And games are fun!

A game is also exactly what Chelsea needed. George Costanza would have been proud of how completely the opposite Chelsea’s first half was to their horrendous early showing against Arsenal. At the Emirates, they looked not so much half-asleep as fully comatose. Maurizio Sarri had spoken of the difficulty of motivating this side, but they will barely have needed telling how dreadful they had been last time out.

Here, they fizzed and crackled and kept Tottenham penned back in their own half, with Eden Hazard – returned to the wing with Olivier Giroud acting as Gonzalo Higuain’s handsome understudy – in especially electric form.

By the time the break rolled around, Chelsea had fired themselves ahead in the tie and headed for the final: N’Golo Kante hit a double-deflected goal that amounted to an equaliser, with the second coming from a move quickly and cleverly initiated by Ross Barkley but given impetus, who carried the ball forward before playing it wide to Cesar Azpilicueta and sprinting into the box to apply a brilliant final touch.

That goal typified the first half: Spurs literally couldn’t keep up with Chelsea, committing more fouls (nine) in the first 45 minutes than they did in the whole 90 against Manchester United earlier this month.

With no away goals and no extra time, however, an entire 135 minutes of football was rendered null and void five minutes after the break, when Fernando Llorente found the net – at the right end, no less – from a Danny Rose cross. That set up an entertainingly end-to-end final 40 minutes with an extreme next-goal-wins feeling to it, as if a dinner lady might wander onto the pitch at any point to ruin the fun by calling time on the action.

Hazard and Christian Eriksen were the respective most-talented boys, with Hazard shooting narrowly wide from a good position and Eriksen putting a delightful cross in from the right that Llorente much too ambitiously tried to take as a volley; he was removed in favour of Lucas Moura just a few minutes later.

The League Cup’s unique “great if we win it, never fancied it anyway if we don’t” meant there was none of the edge and tentativeness that you might otherwise expect from a cup semi final, particularly as almost the entire second half was played with neither side having anything to prove. Chelsea had responded resoundingly to the shoddiness of their previous outing, while Tottenham had good reason to feel they had again done enough to edge away from the ‘Spursy’ label that often feels so outdated, not least coming directly on the heels of taking three points they really had no right to take against Fulham.

We’re sure that tedious accusation will persist after Mauricio Pochettino’s side went on to lose in the shootout, with Eric Dier and Lucas Moura failing to score the decisive kicks to put a familiarly faraway look on their manager’s face – a feeling that won’t have been helped by having had yet more players (this time Ben Davies and Moussa Sissoko) limp off with injuries. But nobody will remember this in a couple of months, particularly if a victory in Sunday’s trip to Crystal Palace were to prove to be the next step in another domestic cup run.

Chelsea, meanwhile, now have the reward of a trip to Wembley to take on Manchester City next month. Get that stray dog a top hat.

Steven Chicken is on Twitter