Life is good lived on the edge. Barcelona played the clásico atop a high-wire, a perfect plan executed with precision and without fear, and finished it at the top of the table, their wonderful week complete. Three days after they scored four against Bayern Munich to exorcise those European ghosts, Hansi Flick’s team came to the Santiago Bernabéu and scored four more. Robert Lewandowski, a new man now, scored twice; Lamine Yamal became the youngest player ever to score in this fixture; and Raphinha lifted in the last, history written.

The risk Barcelona supposedly ran was the one that undid Madrid, not them. Carlo Ancelotti’s team were sliced apart, stripped naked at the Bernabéu by a team that started with six players under 21 in the side. “There are games in Germany they call the clásico but it’s not the same,” Flick had said, and he was right. But even the real clásico isn’t always quite like this; his first was was perfect. Kylian Mbappé’s was not: three shots, he had, and those were just the ones that did count, Repeatedly caught in a perfectly laid trap, there were many more that did not.