Bayern Munich, the team they could not beat, the ogres who had put eight past them in Lisbon, defeated them six times in a row, racking up an aggregate score of 22-4, and that had not even conceded the last four times they met, the team that were just too good, left here in pieces, expertly sliced apart. Four times Barcelona cut through them, Raphinha scoring a hat-trick and Robert Lewandowski getting another in a 4-1 win.
"You owe us one," Barcelona's president, Joan Laporta, had told Hansi Flick; here the coach who, like Lewandowski, had been on the other side the night of that 8-2 humiliation, the ultimate symbol of the Catalans' decline, repaid them in full. "It is not about the past; it is about the here and now," he had insisted.
Right here, right now, his team look genuinely good again. A decade since they last won this competition, how they have needed this. How they did it too, an exhibition in incision.
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