Like the rest of the city, the building has been patched up bit by bit, year by year, but there remains the odd ancient scar imprinted in the brickwork from the bullets and the shrapnel.

“See over there,” he says, looking a few hundred yards past the flats. “That was the war’s front line. Right next to our school.”

Armin takes me to the small patch of grass where he, Dzeko and their pals would dare to have a kickaround when they thought it safe. Look up and it chills to see its perilous proximity to the Serb forces’ firing line high above the playground. It never was safe.

“Parents were afraid to let you out but we did play. We’d play for 15 minutes, then hear the sound of the shell, shwoooo, and everyone runs as fast as hell back to the blocks. This didn’t happen once or twice,” recalls Armin. “It was our way of life.”

For nine-year-old Edin, that meant back to his gran’s place, holed up in the basement of the ’safe house’ to which he and so many of his family and friends would retreat at various points of the conflict.

Sometimes a dozen, sometimes more, depending on who needed refuge. Safe house? Well, safer than the Dzeko family home in the western suburbs of Brijesce from which they had had to flee. In time, it was practically destroyed like 35,000 others.

This is a poignant day for Armin. It is his 25th birthday and he is being asked to summon locked memories. “My older brother died during the war; he was 16, a boy not a soldier, captured by the enemy and never found.” One of the 12,000 who were killed or went missing during the four-year siege.

“There were people very close to Edin’s family who died too. Nobody wants to talk about it now. You would hear your friend or family had died or was lost. Sometimes really it felt the only thing that saved us was the ball.”

Football made everyone soar. Like the miracle day when, marooned in a world with no water, food, gas or electricity, the power inexplicably came on 15 minutes into the World Cup final, allowing Edin and the gang to watch Brazil beat Italy.