Some returned after the financial crisis, but have started to drift off again.
His driving run for the goal came at a point of the match when it had started to drift towards a penalty shootout.
It is a reprieve of sorts, however, and has had the impact of recapturing some of the public's attention, which had started to drift away about a month ago, according to the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism.
And yet nobody contradicted Gary Lineker, a previous winner of this competition's Golden Boot, when he met a few of us football writers at his hotel on Ipanema beach last Friday, with some of the best views of the morning surf, and confessed to feeling marginally let down by the way Messi's tournament had started to drift.
Neymar had started to drift out of the game and the crowd were becoming increasingly fractious with Scolari by the time Rooney picked up the ball in the inside-left channel, cut inside and reminded us of that brilliant and too often concealed talent.
The prodigal son had started to drift away from the family.
The group had started to drift apart from manager Kit Lambert due to his preoccupation with their label, Track Records.
However, when Spider announced that he wanted to settle down and buy a house with Toyah, the couple realised that they had started to drift apart.
The attention of some supporters has already started to drift.
That demographic had already started to drift away from the newsstand in recent years, as commercial pressures forced much of the celeb media to abandon the fun, irreverent brand of reporting and resort increasingly to straight-between-the-eyes scandal.
Three or four regular satellites could have formed and started to drift outward under the influence of tides raised on the moons by Saturn's gravitational pull, the same way Earth's moon has been slowly drifting outward since it formed.
