The contrast between captain and manager was clear: Declan Rice, ahead of his final West Ham outing, talking about legacy; David Moyes, who this week insisted he wants to stay on at the Hammers, giving short shrift to the prospect of becoming a legend.
"I don't think of myself as any different to anyone else in this room," Moyes said in his press conference at Eden Arena here in Prague, where tonight his side face Fiorentina in the club's first major European final in 47 years.
"I'm really fortunate and privileged and thankful to be given an opportunity to be a football manager and to have the opportunity to go this far in my career and be on a stage like this.
"I don't ever really think of myself as being a legend or any words like that. I'd just like to be known as a football manager."
Whatever his hesitancy, there is something deeply personal about this final for Moyes, the 60-year-old having ridden out the season's criticism to stand on the precipice of the first major silverware in his long career. He admitted that having watched contemporaries and rivals take their shots at glory for years while working on some of the sport's biggest games for UEFA, it felt "surreal" to be, at last, the man in the box seat.
For Rice, at 24 and about to spread his wings, there is less a sense of urgency, but no less desperation; the opportunity there to sign off from the club that believed in him when others did not, from the club he has come to define, in fitting style.
The captain, notably, was spared media duties yesterday, presumably for fear the occasion would be dominated by talk of his future, but issued something of a rallying call on club channels.
"There's a chance to go and create a legacy where every single player, the manager, everyone involved, will be remembered for ever," the midfielder said. "It would be my biggest achievement I've had in football so far, 100 per cent."
There is neat symmetry to the place in the annals of West Ham history that awaits Messrs Moyes and Rice, the former with the chance to become, after John Lyall and Ron Greenwood, only the third Hammers manager to win a trophy, the latter to join Bobby Moore and Billy Bonds as only the third captain to lift one.
But what of the supporting cast? It does not quite seem right to be mentioning the likes of Thilo Kehrer and Said Benrahma in the same newspaper, never mind sentence, as Bonds and Moore, but in the context of a club's 43-year wait for silverware, there is space in a select club for them, too.
Opportunities like this simply do not come around often for teams like West Ham, and that is not to belittle one of the country's biggest, proudest clubs. English football, though, has changed, and gone are the days when a full field of contenders would start every campaign with an eye on cup success. Manchester City's dominance is about to reach a level almost unparalleled, Pep Guardiola's side good for, on average, two of the three domestic titles on offer each year. In the past 10 seasons, only one team outside the Premier League's so-called 'big six' have lifted a major trophy at home or abroad. Indeed, one of those inside it have not.
There’s a chance to go and create a legacy where everyone involved will be remembered for ever
As the pool of conquerors shallows, the spoils of victory are less evenly dispersed and for all West Ham's financial advantage over their Conference League opposition, this is not a squad made up of superstars or serial winners.
There are notable exceptions: Lucas Paqueta cost £50million and his presence at West Ham increasingly looks a trick of the light; Kurt Zouma and Emerson enjoyed trophy-laden stints on the periphery at Chelsea; Alphonse Areola has walls full of medals from Paris Saint-Germain and Real Madrid.
But there are also players like Aaron Cresswell and Angelo Ogbonna, club loyalists in the twilight of their careers for whom this opening will surely not come again; the Czech pair of Tomas Soucek and Vladimir Coufal for whom the stars could not have more perfectly aligned; a local lad in Flynn Downes and adopted cockney Pablo Fornals, who would enjoy nothing like this level of appreciation elsewhere; wingers, in Jarrod Bowen and Benrahma, who made their names in the Championship; a throwback centre-forward in Michail Antonio, on whom the club has tried to upgrade but somehow keeps coming back to, and his understudy Danny Ings, cruelly left out of Liverpool's Champions League Final squad four years ago.
They are, in short, a bit of a hodge-podge bunch, a collection of unlikely lads brought together gradually and as much by circumstance as any grand, overarching vision.
Like few West Ham teams before them, though, they stand on the brink of immortality.
