From Juventus-Inter on 8 March 2020 to Inter-Juventus on next Sunday.
There are 10 months of stop, restarts, controversies, cases of positivity, healings, difficulties, crises and games without an audience, from the pre-pandemic Italian derby to next Sunday.
Despite everything, football survived 10 months of living with the coronavirus.
But it did so by paying a very high price, like that of many other sectors and as "the first important thing of the least important", according to the definition of Arrigo Sacchi.
And in a certain sense, for football, it all started with Juve-Inter 10 months ago.
That Sunday, the second of Lent, the recovery of the 26th matchday is played, postponed by a week due to the epidemic amidst controversy.
While all of Italy awaits decisions on the looming lockdown and the trains are stormed, the quarrel between the clubs of A is total, between calendar, clogged dates, opposing parties between supporters of 'stop' and 'let's play', starting from recover and mutual accusations of the fans, refreshed by the hypothesis of playing that historic challenge on 13 May.
And there are those who suspect that a quadrature is not found precisely because Juve-Inter is involved.
In the end, the day is set for 8 March, the last date of the dpcm which requires the doors closed at that moment: but it is played in an empty stadium, in the evening, the penultimate match before the lockdown.
The 'derby of Italy', won by the bianconeri 2-0, is behind closed doors.
As well as Sassuolo-Brescia the day after.
These are the last jolts before the Serie A block, which the Football Association sanctions on 10 March.
It will start again only on June 20th, ending on August 2nd.
But it is all sport that stops, in Europe as in the rest of the world, losing - among other things - the Tokyo Olympics and the European football championships.
There is a war to be fought against the mysterious Covid-19, a virus that comes from a distant Chinese city, Wuhan.
On 8 March last year, Italy was crying 133 deaths, bringing the total to 366. On Wednesday, the threshold of 80 thousand victims was exceeded.
That the coronavirus is an emergency is clear right away, but to understand its real extent it will take time and many lives.
Otherwise on February 19, 2020, at the San Siro, the Champions Atalanta-Valencia would not be staged.
50,000 from Bergamo arrive in Milan.
Their team wins 4-1 and is the latest sporting joy for the city that will soon be the most affected by grief.
Some immunologists have defined it as the 'zero match' for the contribution it would have given to the spread of the infection when it was still not clear how it had arrived in Italy.
The most popular professional sport struggled between the desire not to stop and the rush to leave in order not to die in turn.
Seasoned by moments of misunderstanding with politics, which often interpreted it as a form of insensitivity to the ongoing drama.
To return to play he learned the strict health protocols shared with the CTS.
Continuous cycle buffers and home isolation of the positives have helped football survive the absence of fans, the escape of sponsors, the requests for pay TV discounts, the forced coexistence in the sterile 'bubbles' of withdrawals.
In the meantime, however, hundreds of millions of revenues (about 700 as of 30 June 2020) have evaporated and the debate for an agreement on generalized salary cuts - after those decided individually by some companies - has become increasingly pressing and difficult to postpone.
On the pitch, the protagonists had to learn that even training in a group was an achievement;
that the most beautiful moment, that of the goal, could no longer be celebrated with collective hugs, but at most with a touch of the elbow.
In the silence of the stadiums (which returned to populate only for a short period with a thousand fans 'by invitation') the ball has lived and lives a dimension that is completely alien to it, among virtual fans, cardboard shapes, applause and fake roars, which do not excite.
This is why he did not resign himself to the absence of the public, the most evident feature of this diversity.
But the explosion of the second wave, towards mid-October, cut off any hope of reopening, albeit contingent, in the bud.
Tomorrow another Italian derby will be played, football is no longer the same and the end of the tunnel is still far away.