At 1.22 in the morning Berlin time, Henri Delaunay headed towards Checkpoint Charlie hidden inside a plain metal trunk. It wasn’t until he was safely on board the bus beneath the Olympic stadium that Álvaro Morata opened the case and took the cup out again, the European champions rolling out into the dark and the direction of a hotel on Marlene Dietrich Platz, less than a mile from the crossing, where families and friends waited for them. They had actually done it, let the party continue.
That afternoon, a few hours before the biggest moment of their lives, five Spain players were chatting after lunch. A month earlier, before they had even set off for Germany, Morata had insisted that it was going to be a substitute that decided it; now, sitting round a table at the Grand Hyatt hotel, Álex Remiro, the third-choice goalkeeper and the only member of the squad who had not played a minute at Euro 2024, told Mikel Oyarzabal that tonight he was going to be the one. And so it was.
