Perhaps it was always meant to be this way in Istanbul. In a sprawling city that straddles two continents and lives off its chaotic, consuming energy, a football club that has embraced just about every emotion possible reached the pinnacle while threatening to fall back to earth throughout. They were never going to make it look easy.
But Manchester City are champions of Europe. Somehow. Deservedly. Forgettably and unforgettably. Five minutes before midnight on a sultry Istanbul evening, the dream became a reality.
City fans had travelled to one of the continent's furthest outposts in their thousands to witness a coronation and a coronation is what they got. Nobody connected to City will want to relive the football produced at the Ataturk Stadium, but the celebrations are another matter.
This was City's dream and their obsession on the line. This was City's treble on the line. This was everything to them and five minutes before midnight on the banks of the Bosphorus, they had scaled their Everest.
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As the final whistle blew Pep Guardiola, who more than anyone has lived every minute of this club's desire to win this competition, marched down the touchline to embrace his opposite number Simone Inzaghi. All around him, bedlam ensued.
The staff and substitutes swarmed the pitch. The players, who had just been defending one last corner, raced to their supporters, but Ilkay Gundogan and Erling Haaland collapsed to the turf before they had even reached halfway line.
Guardiola returned for an embrace with his staff. There were hugs for Rodolfo Borrell and Manel Estiarte. Five minutes later his face was red from the tears that were now as unstoppable as his team.
There was maybe also a sense of relief in there. This was not pretty. Guardiola had called it on Friday evening when he sat in a packed press conference room just over 24 hours before kick-off and said "when it is 0-0 the Italians think they are winning". He might not have expected the placid nature of City's first-half performance, but Inter's positivity he did see coming.
Given the expectations on both teams, the first half felt like a victory for Inter. City were nervous and as the Serie A side grew in confidence, it only added to the feeling of being sucked into the kind of game they didn't want amongst Guardiola's squad. On three occasions in the first 45 minutes, he tried to get a message across to tell his players to calm down, to relax. To play their game.
But by now they were deep into that feeling of things not going well for them and going perfectly for Inter, even though the score was still level. Nobody in the City squad would have expected this to be the cakewalk some were predicting, but also they knew they were heavy favourites and they had embraced the pressure. Now the pressure was threatening to suffocate them.
Guardiola might not have made any team selections as radical as he did in Porto two years ago, but there were similar feelings of deja vu, most clearly Kevin De Bruyne's departure through injury. It only added to the sense that things weren't going to plan.
By the hour mark it was scrappy, it was tempestuous, it was stop-start and it was, against so many predictions, in the balance. That only added to the sense of unease around a City side who knew what was at stake.
When Manuel Akanji left a ball for Ederson, who instead retreated back towards goal, Guardiola collapsed on to all fours in the technical area. Lautaro Martinez's shot was smothered and Guardiola stared at the grass in relief, but by now City were living life on the edge and hating every minute of it.
It felt like the game was deadlocked but it only added to the tension. But City have the individual quality to go with their collective brilliance. There was a degree of good fortune with the way the ball fell to Rodri, but his controlled finish in the white heat of a Champions League final with the treble on the line was magnificent.
Even after taking the lead, the final quarter of the game was never going to be easy. Inter almost responded immediately and should have done so in the last minute.
The drama was summed up in the contorted face of a supporter caught on the big screen during Inter's chance to rescue themselves. Romelu Lukaku's header just hit Ederson on the line and somehow Ruben Dias headed the rebound wide of his own goal.
The supporter looked like the wind had changed while he was sneezing. It was a face that suggested he'd spent his entire life seeing City concede in those kinds of moments. Now they were getting away with it. This is a club that has changed.
Those supporters behind that goal had spent hours trying to navigate the 36kms journey from the city centre to the Ataturk Stadium. Some had arrived six or seven hours before kick-off. Others bailed out of taxis near to the ground. Some hopped on the back of a pick-up truck with Inter's ultras. All of them just had to be out on the edge of this city in time to see history being made.
Even the two coaches decked out in City blue and carrying club branding had to pick their way through the traffic near the stadium, pulling in around an hour and 20 minutes before kick-off. You can't imagine Sheikh Mansour faced the same challenges, but that is what a personal fortune of nearly £17billion gets you.
He's ploughed around £2.5billion of that into Manchester City but this was just his second game. The last time he attended a fixture James Milner was making his debut and Gareth Barry scored. This is a team and a club that has come a long way under his ownership.
The Sheikh's investment in City had already returned seven Premier League titles, six League Cups and three FA Cups. But this was the one they prized above all others. Now City and Guardiola can forget about that night in Porto. They can forget Monaco and Tottenham. Liverpool and Real Madrid.
Now, 8,778 days since that third-tier play-off success against Gillingham, the day when maybe everything changed, everything has finally come together. It felt like typical City that in the season they spent in the depths of the Football League they had to watch United win the treble. Now, they have a treble of their own and supporters who have toured Wrexham and Wycombe, who were at York in defeat and attended local derbies at Stockport, were going to drink to that long into the Istanbul night.
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