And finally, the Copa Libertadores is done. We have a champion. It is River Plate. But are Boca Juniors losers? That doesn’t do the circumstances justice. They have suffered enough.
We can get carried away describing football as war or a battle but even the finest of wordsmiths would struggle to capture the unimaginable breadth of emotions and experiences we’ve all gone through.
This was a title that played out on so many fronts: first in a drowning city, then in the streets, around the boardroom table, at an appeals tribunal and, at last, on the pitch itself.
The key locations were just as diverse: Buenos Aires, Asuncion, Lausanne, Madrid. All whilst generating millions of dollars worth of coverage for a Middle Eastern airline that sponsored it.
History will record River Plate as 3-1 winners on the night and 5-3 victors on aggregate, but had Leonardo Jara’s shot in the final minute of extra-time gone in, the game would have gone to a penalty shootout.
Penalties are rarely a just way to decide a football match but they would have been fitting in this instance. However, Jara’s shot hit the wrong side of the post.
It is a game of inches sometimes. Frighteningly so. How the emotions of a nation can rise and fall such margins.
So it was that the goal that put River ahead - a scorching effort from Juan Fernando Quintero - clipped the underside of the bar before going in. He’d been threatening to do something like that from the moment he came on.
This was a final that was, ultimately, probably too big for its own good. Certainly too big for its own country, which proved incapable of safely pulling off two explosive legs.
It is still possible that Buenos Aires will explode into rioting in the coming days. It was guaranteed to happen had the second leg taken place there, anyway.
But it is more likely that most Portenos, exhausted to a man, will spend some time contemplating the place of football in their lives.
River, a club of the middle-upper class, will be thrilled with the victory but not the manner. They’ll have a mighty party when the squad return home, but the actions of some idiots have tarnished the trophy.
To that end, many will argue that the match shouldn’t have gone ahead, with the second leg either called off and either Boca awarded the title or joint-champions be sanctioned - or no trophy been offered.
But football is still football; it needs to rise above, no matter what happens. And who was it that rose above? The players themselves.
Chance after chance, end-to-end and all points in between. I could feel my own heart thumping madly as Boca goalkeeper Esteban Andrada took a series of crazy-brave risks to keep the game alive.
And he had to do it, largely because of Wilmar Barrios’ moment of madness. It’s not surprising that a player lost his head on this occasion, but his two-footed tackle will follow him for the rest of his career.
And it was that numerical advantage that tilted the tie in River’s favour. Trailing 1-0 to Dario Benedetto’s splendid opener, it was always going to be Lucas Pratto who answered back - just like in the first leg.
Pratto, the freakishly gifted forward who never made the most of his talents, now experiences the opposite emotion to Barrios. He can play out his career in harmony, knowing that when it mattered, he showed the world what he could do.
And it is that raw talent which shouldn’t be forgotten in all of this. In a bizarre way, seeing South American football played at the Bernabeu - and being the most entertaining thing seen there in years - will offer validation for any doubters.
Everyone knew the passion would be enormous. It was. Fuelled by an intensity we are unlikely to see again, this final was a remarkable occasion.
In the end, it lived up to all the hype and then surpassed it. By a long, long way.
