Liverpool Football Club were melting into the grayness, too. By the 1990s, Liverpool often weren’t good enough to play in the Champions League, let alone win it.

In 1996, when Jerzy Dudek was twenty-two, he caught the attention of a first-division Polish team, who signed him to play for a salary of around $400 a month. After that, Dudek’s rise was astonishing: Within six months, he was transferred to a Dutch team, Feyenoord, where he finally began to make a living wage playing goalie. After a few years with Feyenoord, Dudek signed a multimillion-pound contract with Liverpool.

But he was miserable. Of the time, he wrote, “The first few days in Liverpool were the worst ones of my life. I felt really lonely. I was in a new place with a new language, which I couldn’t speak.” All these quotes, by the way, are from Dudek’s autobiography, which he titled, A Big Pole in Our Goal. That’s the song Liverpool fans sang about him, to the tune of “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands.” We’ve got a big Pole in our goal.

Before we get to May 25, 2005, I just want to note one more thing. Professional goalkeepers spend a lot of time practicing trying to save penalty kicks. Jerzy Dudek had faced thousands of penalty kicks, and he approached them in precisely the same way: He stood stock-still in the middle of the goal until a moment before the ball was kicked, and then he dove one way or another. Always. Without exception.

The 2004–2005 season saw Liverpool go on a magical run through the Champions League, and by April they were preparing to play the famed Italian club Juventus in the quarterfinals when Pope John Paul II died. Dudek ended up on the bench for that game—he couldn’t think straight after the death of his childhood hero and found himself near tears as he confessed to the team doctor that he couldn’t play that night. Liverpool won the game nonetheless, and eventually made their way to the Champions League final, where they would play another Italian giant, AC Milan.

The final was played in Istanbul, and it began horribly for Dudek and Liverpool. Fifty-one seconds into the game, Milan scored. They scored two more goals just before halftime. Dudek’s wife, Mirella, at home in Poland preparing for their son’s first communion, recalled a “deathly silence” descending over Szczygłowice.

Of the Liverpool locker room at halftime, Dudek wrote, “Everyone was broken.” Liverpool defender Jamie Carragher said, “My dreams had turned to dust.” The players could hear the forty thousand Liverpool fans singing “You’ll Never Walk Alone” in the stands above, but they knew it was, as Carragher put it, “in sympathy more than belief.”

The rest I know by heart, because I’ve seen it so many times. Nine minutes after the second half begins, Liverpool’s captain Steven Gerrard scores with a balletic header. Liverpool score again two minutes later, and then again four minutes after that. Now it’s tied 3–3. The match goes into thirty minutes of extra time. Milan pour on the pressure. It is so obvious that they are the better team. Liverpool’s players are exhausted, just hoping to get to a penalty shoot-out.