Serie A has long held an undeserved reputation as a retirement league. The jibe itself so long in the tooth that it seldom even raises a smile any longer.

Still, every stereotype is based on something true and the summer transfer window saw a steady flow of veterans into the Italian top flight.

AC Milan and Pisa got themselves a pair of 40-year-olds in Luka Modric and Raul Albiol respectively, while Fiorentina snapped up 39-year-old Edin Dzeko and 38-year-old Jamie Vardy signed for newly-promoted Cremonese. Napoli, meanwhile, opted for the relatively fresh legs of 34-year-old Kevin De Bruyne.

Compared with Lamberto Boranga, however, the they are positively wet behind the ears.

Last month Boranga followed a well-trodden path and returned to football six years after retiring. So far, so normal, you may think.

Except that the former Perugia and Fiorentina goalkeeper will be 83 on October 30. Yes, eighty-three.

For context, Boranga first retired in 1983, eight years before De Bruyne was born. And Napoli were more than a year away from signing Diego Maradona, who was born on the same day as the veteran goalkeeper.

“Diego and I share the same date of birth, and we would wish each other well every year,” the keeper once famously recalled. “But I never, for a single moment, considered myself to be a better player than him.”

The octogenarian stopper has just signed for Trevana in the Prima Categoria division – the seventh tier of the Italian pyramid – and he plans to play in October. He began his career with the Umbrian club back in the 1950s.

“I was at a conference for my book, Saving Old Age, and the mayor, some city officials, and the club president came up to me,” he recalled last month.

“They proposed the idea of coming back to play one last game where I had played my very first one. They finally won me over, and I figured, ‘You know what? Why not? I’ll do it’.”

Boranga has been training for the past month, working with Mauro Bonaiuti, the former Inter Milan goalkeeping coach, and plans to pull on his gloves one final time next month. And he is tackling the challenge with typical professionalism.

“From a fitness standpoint, I’m currently at 20% and I need to work to get to at least 60%,” he said. “I have no intention of making a fool of myself. The problem isn’t so much my reflexes, but rather diving from one post to the other.”

The prospect of an 82-year-old flying across goal may seem impossible, but Boranga has long made a habit of defying convention and Father Time.

Born in 1942, the same year as Dino Zoff, who became the oldest-ever World Cup winner when he captained Italy to glory in 1982, Boranga racked up more than 300 appearances in his career, with 112 coming in Serie A with Cesena and Fiorentina.

Bongo, as he his colloquially known, retired in 1983 and made his first return nine years later, filling in for the wonderfully named Bastardo, an amateur team from near his home town of Foligno in Umbria, who had both their regular goalkeepers out injured.

In 2009, Boranga was again called out of retirement when Ammeto, another local team, came calling as their keepers were all suspended. “I couldn’t resist the allure of the football pitch,” Boranga, who was 67 at the time, said.

After making four appearances for Ammeto, three years later he decided that he wanted to start playing on a weekly basis again and signed for Papiano, a local team just south of Perugia.

He stepped away from the game again in 2015, only to return three years later when he signed for Marottese, a club in Marche’s Terza Categoria – the ninth tier.

Boranga’s success extends beyond football. He is a multiple gold medalist in track and field, with wins in the long jump and high jump at the World and European Masters Championships.

In 2008 he set a long jump world record for athletes over 65 with a leap of 5.47m. A few days after turning 70, he broke the world record in the triple jump for his age group with a mark of 10.75m.

In the high jump, he still cleared 1.25m last year. Not that Boranga felt there was anything worth celebrating. “I used to jump 1.70m when I was 60 and could clear 1.40m when I was 70,” he said.

So what is the secret behind his incredible longevity? “Sex, sport and healthy eating habits,” was his explanation to La Gazzetta dello Sport earlier this year.

“We are what we eat. We need to vary our food as much as possible. Our diet should be dynamic, not static.”

The benefits of working out are self-explanatory, but what of the third ingredient of Boranga’s recipe for a healthy life?

“Sex is essential. After all, it exists for reproduction and for self-preservation,” he said.

Boranga’s medical knowledge should not come as a surprise either. He still practises as a cardiologist in his Perugia clinic, where he visits an “average of 20 patients a day”.

Medicine and football have always gone hand-in-hand for Boranga, who began studying medicine and biology at the University of Parma in 1967, when he left Fiorentina for Reggiana, then in Serie B.

Bongo had amassed 133 appearances in five seasons with Perugia, but the move to La Viola in 1966 proved disappointing as he failed to nail down a starting spot and left after just one season to join Reggiana.

The drop to Serie B proved an inspired choice as he went on to make 109 appearances for the Granata in three seasons, before Cesena came calling shortly after he had secured a prestigious job at the Institute of Hygiene and Prophylaxis in Reggio Emilia.

“I forfeited the professional security and went into the risky and unstable world of football,” Boranga later recalled of his move to the Bianconeri, then an established Serie A side.

Five decades on, the risky and unstable world of football maintains the same stronghold on Bongo it held then.