And then: With ninety seconds left in extra time, Jerzy Dudek makes a double save on two point-blank shots that occur within a second of each other. The save is so good that an entire chapter of A Big Pole in Our Goal is devoted to it. The save is so good that even now, fifteen years later, when I see replays of it, I still think the Milan player is going to score. But instead, Jerzy Dudek makes the save every time, and the game goes to a penalty shoot-out.

So you’re Jerzy Dudek. You’ve been practicing saving penalties since you were a kid, and you have your way of doing it. You’ve lain awake at night imagining this moment. The Champions League final, down to penalties, you in goal, standing stock-still until the moment before the ball is kicked.

But then, in the moments before the shoot-out begins, Jamie Carragher runs over to you. He jumps on your back and starts shouting. “Carra came up to me like he was crazy,” Dudek remembered. “He grabbed me and said, ‘Jerzy Jerzy Jerzy, remember Bruce Grobbelaar.’”

Carragher was screaming at him: Do the wobbly legs! Move around on the goal line! Just like in 1984! But that was twenty-one years before—with different players, a different coach, and a different opponent. What could that moment possibly have to do with this one?

There are times in your life when you do things precisely as you have practiced and prepared for them. And then there are times when you listen to Jamie Carragher. So in the most important moment of Jerzy Dudek’s professional life, he decided to try something new.

His spaghetti legs didn’t look exactly like Grobbelaar’s had, but he danced on the goal line, his legs wobbling this way and that. “I didn’t recognize my husband,” Mirella Dudek said. “I couldn’t believe he . . . danced so crazily in the goal.”

Liverpool scored all but one of their penalties. For Milan, facing the dancing Dudek, it was a different story. Milan’s first penalty taker missed the goal entirely, and then Dudek saved two of the next four penalties, and Liverpool completed what came to be known as “The Miracle of Istanbul.”

Someone tell ten-year-old Jerzy Dudek that he is going to save two penalties in a European Cup final by making the weirdest possible choice. Someone tell twenty-one-year-old Jerzy Dudek playing for $1,800 a year that he is a decade away from lifting the European Cup.

You can’t see the future coming—not the terrors, for sure, but you also can’t see the wonders that are coming, the moments of light-soaked joy that await each of us. These days, I often feel like I’m Jerzy Dudek walking out for the second half down 3–0, feeling as hopeless as I do helpless. But of all the unimportant things, football is the most important, because seeing Jerzy Dudek sprint away from that final penalty save to be mobbed by his teammates reminds me that someday—and maybe someday soon—I will also be embraced by people I love. It is May of 2020, fifteen years since Dudek’s spaghetti legs, and this will end, and the light-soaked days are coming.