The day Thibaut Courtois sustained the injury that might have ended his season before it had begun, he arrived home, bandage covering the whole of his left leg, slowly got out of his car and told the friend waiting for him: "I'm going to win the Champions League; there's still time."
Nine months and a second torn ligament later, this time in the other knee, after seemingly endless hours of work, the pain and the fear, and with the help of surgeons, physios and the goalkeeper who took Real Madrid there in his absence, he could. And with that, he has won already.
It was 10 August, a morning when, according to his wife, Mishel Gerzig, something didn't feel quite right, and two days before Madrid's opening game away at Athletic. In training at Valdebebas, Courtois had pushed out a shot and as he went towards the ball dropping near Rodrygo, something went.
Falling to the turf, his screams were unlike anything his teammates had heard. They knew immediately something was seriously wrong and the diagnosis confirmed it: he had torn the anterior cruciate ligament in his left knee. His season, he was told, was virtually over. "You never expect anything like this," Courtois wrote that evening.
"Now it's time to accept it and do everything and come back stronger." The prognosis was not made public but after an operation in Madrid on 17 August it was anticipated it would take eight or nine months before he could play again.
Even then, it was unlikely that he would be fully fit, let alone at his best; some players are never quite the same. There were no set dates and there would be a major setback, but the calculations just about gave him the margin to make it. He and his backup, Andriy Lunin, did the rest.
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