Saturday, May 9, 1998, Balfour Street in Bat Yam. It's almost one in the night. I lie in bed, staring at the ceiling and having trouble falling asleep. In a few hours the test will be set to determine my math ranking. Significant test for the accomplished boy I was. Suddenly a car emerges and breaks the silence. Out of it, Paul Dole plays the song "Diva" performed by Dana International, followed immediately by another, then another and another. I realized that something had happened, that Dana had won.

I was a ninth grade student when Dana brought the third trophy to the country, and I will never forget that night. In my most pleasant dreams, I did not imagine that twenty years later, I would stand a few meters from that stage in Lisbon, this time as a journalist sent there to tell you the story of Neta Barzilai, the fourth Israeli winner of the competition.

I started working as a reporter 15 years ago, and since then I have been pervasively reviewing the field of entertainment, television and gossip in Israel. Seven sections a week, five of which are published daily on the back page. In the routine of a country that produces too many dramatic stories, it is an area that is not always appreciated or of particular importance, sometimes underestimated, but its popularity with you surfers, and in general, is not debatable.

• What a decade we had! Go to the special "Summary of the Decade" page

• Disagree with our choices? Let's choose your people and decade-long events

• Think you know everything that happened in the last decade? Enter the huge decade quiz

For the past decade, I've been covering Eurovision as well. Not just a survey, but a trip to the host country, attending the main events and partnering with the journalists from all over Europe. Contrary to what you might think, I am not a freak of competition, but when I travel as a representative of the largest newspaper in Israel and accompany the Israeli representative, I am accompanied by a sense of loyalty and patriotism that does not exist in other coverage - even for the delegation and even more for the country.

Over the past decade, I have accumulated experiences and arrived in cities I probably would not have visited without the competition, see the value of Dusseldorf. Most times, Israeli disappointment was recorded in the competition and no nylon flag waved or falafel distributed at the Israeli party brought us the duz. In the hours that followed, the worn-out excuse came up again - "Everyone is anti-Semitic" - and I poured. Because what did I care to think that it wasn't Mae Feingold's bad song that made us not the final, but the historical hatred of us.

In May 2018, there was a turnaround in the Eurovision plot, which created one of the happiest moments in our history in the country and mine as a journalist in particular. So if it wasn't clear until now, my decade of the moment is Neta Barzilai's victory moment. Long weeks of anticipation, gambling and tension reached boiling point with the announcement of Neta, and I was there when it happened.

With Neta, just after winning in Lisbon

After a lot of interviews, stories and reviews, I didn't think there was a moment that would break my emotional record and significantly increase my heart rate. I sat in the hall next to her parents during the performance, stood on the tables in the media room in the scoring division, overnight I became Cyprus's biggest enemy and also bypassed (an opportunity to apologize to the bystanders) the whole queue for a press conference to take a front row seat in front of the winner.

The morning after I broke a new personal record, when I first starred in the main article of the front page of the paper. The depressing political headlines grabbed Neta's pink. Then I also discovered a leg injury as a result of a leg encounter with a Swedish team tripod. Real-time euphoria overcame the pain, but left a scar for life. If you already have a scar then at least you will be from a happy moment worth remembering.