Did ever a single game carry so much promise as the one that will unfold in Paris tomorrow morning?
Possibly not, but then we should remind ourselves that the Champions' League final between Arsenal and Barcelona comes without guarantee.
It is a necessary caution when you analyse the pattern of performance on the last stages of a road that lost quite a bit of its illumination.
Barcelona, so beautifully poised and inventive in their quarter-final first-leg against Chelsea at Stamford Bridge, were strangely passive for much of the return in the Nou Camp and it was the same in both their semifinal games against AC Milan.
Arsenal were lucky to survive when they ran down a blind alley in the little ceramics town of Villarreal.
Yet we are right to go to the City of Light with shining eyes. We are right to see beyond the statistics that speak of shut-out defence.
If Arsenal emerge from a season of deep trial and transition with victory over Barcelona they will have gained the highest ground in their magnificent history. Barcelona versus Arsenal carries the ultimate promise of the best values of the world game.
It has the potential be a collector's item, something to put beside the glory of great Real Madrid and Milan and Liverpool teams and the concentrated emotion of Manchester United's wins in 1968 and 1999.
As a game it may also have something unique: an extraordinary unity of ambition, a belief and commitment to a certain kind of football that makes the appearance of these particular teams in the final of the greatest club competition potentially something more than a divine sporting accident. It might just be a symbol of football renaissance.
Certainly this is so when you measure the ambition and the instincts of the coaches, Frank Rijkaard and Arsene Wenger.
Rarely have two football men entered a great stadium creating quite the same balance of mutual desire for performance and style as well as result.
This is the glory of the expectation for tomorrow's game; it transcends, utterly, the discouraging statistics of low-yield attack that has marked the last phase of the campaign.
This is despite the fact that it is maybe not quite true that neither football man has never been infected by the disease of excessive caution. Wenger suffered a brief bout of it a year ago in Cardiff when he dismayed his followers and the game at large by doing something that looked suspiciously like playing for penalties in the FA Cup final.
Manchester United outplayed Wenger's team but, almost inevitably according to the perverse laws of the game, lost in the shoot-out. Wenger said that he was justified by the result. It was a kind of betrayal, one highlighted by the splendour of last weekend's brave attempt by West Ham to upset the odds with genuinely aggressive football.
This, however, was a fleeting blemish rather than a scar and the possibility of massive healing this week is something to bring a tingle to the blood of any neutral.
Any match that presents the talents of such greats as Ronaldinho and Thierry Henry, Lionel Messi (if fitness permits), Deco and Cesc Fabregas will always be likely to stray on the side of the football angels.
It is this capacity to attack with such inventive brilliance that so lifts the spirit and invites you, all over again, to look back in scorn at so many occasions which were supposed to represent the apex of European football.
How many European Cup finals linger in the mind, for example, since the emotional maelstrom of United's victory in Barcelona seven years ago? Only the freakishly explosive recovery of Liverpool in Istanbul last year, and that, we have to accept, was more about the spirit than the science of football.
Zinedine Zidane scored an unforgettable goal against Bayer Leverkusen in 2002 when Real Madrid were still a serious team, but most of the rest was dross. Bayern versus Valencia left the San Siro comatose in 2001 and two years later, at Old Trafford, Milan and Juventus were scoreless and as timid as lambs.
We have to go back 15 years, however, for the nadir of European football and what we must hope was the antithesis of the best that Arsenal and Barca might produce.
It was in Bari when Red Star Belgrade and Marseilles settled for a penalty shoot-out somewhere around the middle of the first half, and it came the year after arguably the worst of all World Cups, the one that provoked the vital change in the back-pass law.
In Paris tomorrow we have reason to believe such days will seem no more than a distant nightmare. Maybe, for once, we should trust in the promise of greatness. It is a rare treat - and the best tribute to football teams who have already brought light to the football darkness.
CHAMPIONS LEAGUE FINAL
Arsenal v Barcelona, Paris, 6.30am tomorrow. Live on Sky Sport 1
- INDEPENDENT
AdvertisementAdvertise with NZME.
Latest from Sport
Off-colour Warriors steamrolled by St George
This wasn’t the Warriors team we have come to know in the Andrew Webster era.
live