View the original article to see embedded media.
With every passing round in this season’s Champions League, the competition it has managed to make its own, Real Madrid’s comebacks have become more spectacular. It looked finished against Paris Saint-Germain and then scored three times in the final half hour of the last 16. It threw away a two-goal lead against Chelsea, then came back to force extra time and find a winner in the quarterfinals. But in neither of those ties did Madrid seem quite so beaten as it did against Manchester City in the second leg of the semifinals on Wednesday.
It was two goals behind on aggregate with 90 minutes on the clock, and yet even the amount of chaos it would have taken to overcome that was not beyond Real Madrid. It is the Spanish champion, and not Man City, that will face Liverpool in the Champions League final in Paris at the end of the month after the unlikeliest of 6–5 aggregate triumphs. It sets up a repeat of the 1981 final, even down to the city (although in a different stadium) when Liverpool won, and a repeat of the final in Kyiv four years ago when Madrid won. It’s a clash of the 13-time winners and the six-time winners, and it will mark the first time two sides will have met in three different finals.
