The suit jacket had long since been discarded, the sleeves of his black shirt pulled up.
Mauricio Pochettino stood at the edge of his technical area, with 88 minutes of this Champions League final played, and watched the Kop-on-tour charge forward to greet Divock Origi’s goal. It was the moment the Tottenham dream truly ended, in a season where they’d hitherto refused to rouse themselves from an ecstatic slumber.
Spurs had one point from three matches and were a goal down in the fourth, before the unlikeliest of group stage comebacks. At one stage the statistical website FiveThirtyEight gave them a less than one per cent chance of making the final.
Then came Dortmund, where Spurs showed their potential to win games on the front foot rather than in some last-gasp heroic rescue act. They weren’t done with those. Not by a long way.
In the quarter-finals came one of those sliding doors moments, when Sergio Aguero had his penalty saved by Hugo Lloris in the new Tottenham Hotspur Stadium. Had that gone in, then Manchester City’s four second-leg goals at the Etihad would have been enough to condemn Spurs to defeat.
But there was a chink of light left for them and the VAR decision to cancel Raheem Sterling’s late hat-trick goal illuminated the path brighter than any Spurs fan thought possible.
Surely then a young emerging Ajax team, with enough potential to supply half of Europe’s elite teams with the next generation of world class talent, would end their way. A team containing Frenkie De Jong, Matthijs De Ligt, Hakim Ziyech and more had knocked out the holders Real Madrid as well as Cristiano Ronaldo’s Juventus.
Add to that a gritty 1-0 win away win in London in the semi-final first leg. Ajax’s path looked so assured that there were Dutch men with the XXX tattoo on their arms all over Madrid this weekend. They’d been busy booking flights, foreseeing the rush between the first and second legs.
When it went to 2-0 on aggregate in Amsterdam, they were home and hosed. But Spurs had learned to play in a different way this Champions League. Necessity is the mother of invention and through injury and suspension, Pochettino was often down to the bare bones of the bare bones.
Fernando Llorente became a key player, Kieran Trippier undroppable. Not out of any great choice, but there was simply no other way.
There were long balls, knock-downs, tonnes of belief and fortitude. With ice-cold analysis, it is tough to see how Spurs got this far in the first place.
Lucas Moura’s hat-trick stunned the world as much as Divock Origi’s fourth goal for Liverpool against Barcelona the night before. Origi was at it again in Madrid, scoring his third Champions League goal of the season, with his third shot. And that’s when reality hit for Spurs.
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The biggest regret will be that there are regrets. It was an energy-sapping, hot evening in Madrid that equalised levels on both sides. Even so, Liverpool made the most of what came their way, Spurs didn’t.
The desire to field Harry Kane was too strong to resist, even though Spurs had looked dangerous with Lucas and Son Heung-min in tandem earlier in the tournament. Kane tried hard but wasn’t at the races.
Dele Alli – substituted – had been Spurs’s best player of these matches but could not deliver. Christian Eriksen wasted the few decent shooting chances that came his way.
They probably did leave it all out there, but maybe they just didn’t have a lot to give.
And, anyway, if Spurs had won this, their fans would still look at the squad as one that needs replenishing. There are about four or five players in the team here who might not appear at the standard that Pochettino or his successor require.
A trophy wouldn’t have changed that because cup competitions are not about mastering seasons, they are about mastering tournaments.
Spurs are a club on the up and might look at recent heartbreak suffered by teams like Liverpool and Atletico Madrid and think there is a way out of the heartbreak. Alas, that is for another day, whether Pochettino stays or not.
All season long, Spurs fans struggled with the impending dread of "doing a Spurs" but they defied it at every turn. They competed well, refused to take what was coming to them.
Saturday night was not a matter of bottle or of any other kind of brittleness. They were beaten by a better team, whose time had come. And yet theirs might.
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