Real Madrid’s latest miracle is a tale of 88 seconds and one Ancelotti video

“Things have happened that no one could possibly imagine,” Carlo Ancelotti said, but you might have heard that one before. You might have seen something a little like this too: last time, for a start. And the time before that. Real Madrid’s players certainly had, that very morning. At the end of another night so ludicrous that in the middle of the madness with the match still going on and tie not yet won Marcelo grabbed his manager and actually started laughing, Ancelotti admitted that he shown the squad a video depicting Madrid’s eight – eight! – comebacks. And that’s just this season.

At the end, he told them that there was one missing.

The best one of all. There were 39 seconds left and Real Madrid needed to score twice or they were out, halted at the gates of the final, their luck running out at last. Eighty-eight seconds later they had done, collective madness taking everyone. Somehow, they had forced extra time; soon, they had the winner, which by then you knew they would. Look in the top corner of your screen. It had shown 89:20 RMA 0 – 1 MCI (3-5). Look again and it showed: 94.13 RMA 3 – 1 MCI (6-5). And it had taken a few seconds to update the score.

“Incredible, isn’t it?” Casemiro said afterwards.

That’s one word for it, yeah. And one word was all Thibaut Courtois had, or so he said: “Madrid,” he replied when asked whether he could explain it. Mostly, they couldn’t. Ancelotti shrugged and smiled. “The greatness of this club,” he said. Kroos described the team as a “joke”. Rodrygo said: “We were dead … and then what happened, happened.”

What happened was the most ridiculous resurrection of them all: even more implausible, the margins finer, the race against the clock more frantic, like they were watching that