Suddenly, Atletico Madrid coach Diego Simeone was up and running. A little uneasily in that suit and those shoes, sliding slightly as he headed down the touchline, but he was. And who could blame him for losing his head?
He knew better than anyone just how big this was, how much of a release, what it really meant, and what lay behind it. How hard it had been to get here. How well the plan had come together — better than even he had dared imagine. Well, him and the man he was now sprinting towards wanting to embrace, to share this moment with.
If the game had been as bad as you might imagine, added time was better than you ever could. After no goals in 90 minutes, for only the second time in Champions League history, three had been scored in added time: a 92nd-minute winner for Atletico that turned out not to be a winner at all, a 96th-minute Porto equaliser via a penalty committed by the man who had scored that “winner” and then, an actual winner in the 101st. Not just any winner; Antoine Griezmann had headed in the latest winning goal anyone had ever scored in the competition.
“This will be the last chance,” the commentator said, and it was. A corner was nodded on by Axel Witsel, and Griezmann was there to score at the far post. He turned and dashed across the south end of the Metropolitano, looking up and all the limbs in the stand, pulling at the badge on his shirt. As a crowd of players grabbed him and everyone went wild, Simeone sprinted from the bench to reach them, skidding round the corner. When he got there, he pushed his way through the crowd, grabbed Griezmann by the face, laid their heads together and, looking him in the eyes, screamed something, holding him hard.
“I love him; he knows the affection I have for him,” Simeone would say later when he had calmed down a little. And when he had hugged him some more. If Griezmann didn’t know before — which is pretty implausible given everything that had happened, all the conversations they had had, the pacts they had forged — he did now.