Somewhere in the middle of all those people, of all the shouting and the crying, the emotion and the endless embraces, Santi Cazorla said that this, this, was the dream of his life. It was the dream of all their lives. At 11.43pm on 21 June 2025, the man who was twice a European champion with the greatest generation Spain has ever seen, who has won at Wembley, the Camp Nou and the Santiago Bernabéu, was crouched at the side of the pitch at the Carlos Tartiere ready for one last run. And when the final whistle went – on this game and an entire era – he set off, 40 years old and a kid again leading them all on to the pitch and into primera.
From the touchline they followed, let loose at last. From everywhere else they did too, the stands where 29,624 fans had been through it again emptying on to the pitch. A quarter of a century later, Real Oviedo had returned to the first division. “It’s been many years in the mud,” Cazorla said: they had disappeared down to the second, third and fourth tier, twice they had almost disappeared entirely; here, against Mirandés in the playoff final second leg, the match he called “the biggest of my career”, they had conceded early, two goals down on aggregate, and were taken into extra time, tension tearing at them, even as they knew it was never going to be easy, but now they had actually done it; now they were back. In their centenary year.
