“Sometimes I wonder what it must be like to be from Madrid. The epic, the shield, the Champions with the chorra. Then I put myself in a fetal position and cry ”, a friend writes to me in the second part culé. He answered quickly, as the article expects: “Being from Madrid is signing 4-0 in the 15th minute because this has to end sometime, and suddenly seeing ourselves at 2-3: it never ends.” I hit send just as Benzema scores the fourth. “I’m going to sleep,” he replies. It’s fair: it’s not hours. We will never know how much millions of people who, all over the world, go to bed early during the week owe Madrid. The hours they rest, how clear they are the next day, the impressive performance at work with the mobile in airplane mode so that they do not enter whatsapp undesirables Another friend, Lolo Viejo, wrote to me: “I don’t want to go back to the Negreira League.” There are no more messages. I don’t have any other friends either. Who needs them if Modric, Benzema and Vinicius play in your team.
Madrid raised a cathedral in Anfield, a crowded temple of world football, before a club that is pure aristocracy, with a history that falls out of their pockets as much and as well as their elegance, paying homage to Amancio, a white legend, with a legend red, Kenny Dalglish. And after the recognition, with a minute of enviable silence, Liverpool hastened to have a snack for Madrid. In two bites. He watered the white field with lava, occupied his area and crushed the Real Madrid goal with two goals before the first quarter of an hour. Again the terrible script of Manchester and the black clouds everywhere, again Madrid drowned and overcome, lost, before a deadly avalanche led by a entranced Salah. And this time, with Modric and Benzema a year older, with Courtois unlucky (40 blunders like that can be allowed after the Paris final) and Alaba stabbed by Salah over and over again.
Vinicius happened. Right now the Brazilian is a volcano. A player who jumps the steps three at a time. A wild shot was taken from the boot, before football, a missile with an effect that came out of nowhere, like the 9 cigars that do not need to move the boot to avoid giving away space. The ball went to an impossible place, one of those unexplored corners of the planet that a forward arrives before a geologist, and Madrid began to dance to the rhythm of their golden child. The lava changed color. And the European champion dropped all the Champions League on the field of Liverpool, who accused the psychological destruction of the second rebound goal. It was the great difference of this historic match. That when Madrid saw itself with two below, the ghosts of City appeared to it, therefore it collapsed; that when Liverpool saw their two goals come from behind, the ghosts of kyiv and Paris appeared, the lost finals, and they fell apart.
The game closed with a stampede of two players aged 35 and 37 supported by one of 22 who was in four goals. Modric’s career, so similar to the race against PSG; the change of pace, the handling of the ball by a player from that period in which an inexhaustible light has turned on, the light that illuminates his last European nights, leaving his rivals behind with a single stride, resisting the attacks of younger people and stronger, to release it to Vinicius and for him to give it to Benzema. The Frenchman sat down Alisson, sat down Anfield, stopped time in front of the goal for two seconds while the goalkeeper screamed desperately from the ground (the image in the repetition is tremendous) and sealed a win forever that does justice to Amancio Amaro, to Ferenc Puskas, an Alfredo Di Stéfano, a Paco Gento. To that Madrid of which fewer and more memories remain alive; that Madrid that continues, unalterable, until today, making new memories for those who arrive 50 years from now.
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