This is Madrid and this is the Champions

I don't know how to explain, nor do I want to, what happened at the Bernabéu, and in the places where the Bernabéu was being televised, when Real Madrid scored the second goal against City in added time (their natural territory).

I only know that Madrid was never more Madrid than in that goal, and in the minutes that followed, and that everything that happened at the Bernabéu afterwards, and in the places where the Bernabéu was being seen, we madridistas will remember while Let's live and perhaps, as Madrid also does, after we die.

Because there is no way to forget it even if you want to, and who would want to forget something like that.

Who wants rational explanations when they are given emotions like this: who wants to know why he jumps screaming for joy if he is already jumping for joy;

It is better that nobody explains anything to you, we already explained this to ourselves.

This is Madrid and this is the Champions League, and these are not the games, but the minutes that define the history of a club and its relationship with the fans.

This is the legend being made live in front of our eyes.

These are the things that will be talked about in a hundred years.

And we have seen them.

What remains at the end of everything, when no one believes in anything anymore, is this little bit of happiness, which is the happiness that will never end.

Remembering how much fun we had the minute everything happened again, how crazy we went once, twice, three times against the best teams in the world, when Madrid scored when nobody waited and dialed twice more, and we thought that no one would believe us.

When is this over?

It ended for the others when we began to knock them down, no one knows how, but methodically: when they thought we were out.

He began the second part with the grace that the most absent-minded gods grant to misguided angels like Vinicius, spendthrift strikers who prowl glory like carnivores whose fangs are still growing: they bite, but they still don't quite kill when they bite.

The flash of his left foot in front of the goal went against the fence, as they say Juanito did when he kicked off center so that the stands would go crazy.

The ruling woke up the Bernabéu.

The Madrid stadium is a stadium so accustomed to prowess that sometimes it seems that it is wishing for the opponent's goals or its own mistakes to plug into the games.

The missed opportunity was a flare on the high seas when Madrid began to look its shipwreck in the face again.

The club in Europe most self-absorbed with his death: he has tried all the boxes in the world, and none of them suits him.

The City was responsible for making him believe.

The entire history of Madrid's Champions League this year has consisted of making him believe something that was not, sometimes to the point of recklessness;

he pretended to be a swimmer when he was a shark.

He has come to have half of his body inside the rival before showing his jaws.

The overexcited stands heated up in the second half and Madrid's attack was revolutionized, dying at the beginning of the area, where the white monsters decide the matches.

They didn't decide anything.

City took advantage of it by scoring a goal that froze the city.

All of Madrid was exhausted in 1989. Everything?

Here is never everything.

You can follow EL PAÍS Deportes on

Exclusive content for subscribers

read without limits

subscribe

I'm already a subscriber