The announcement from Alexia Putellas that she would be leaving the club of her ACTUAL life, a story lived from childhood and a father wanting her to one day, fight for the colors, an arc of sustained excellence that ended with helping that very same team lift the Champions League trophy, hit me and a lot of other people like a ton of bricks.

In looking for the words to explain why, for me they are in fact pretty simple, once the world is no longer being seen through a veil of tears: Alexia Putellas embodies everything that Barça is supposed to stand for. From coming up through the system to helping build a team that became a juggernaut, a selfless devotion to a club that is rare.

So many culers don’t and will never understand why Barça Femeni is special, and has a special place in the hearts of those who do understand. And that’s okay. But it’s weird to remember the first time you saw a player, having no idea who it was but seeing them and their game and saying, “Who TF IS that?”

On a pitch stuffed with fellow professionals, like that player at the top of their profession, and this player just makes everyone look second class. She goes where she wants, does what she wants, scores, assists, plays like she has already seen a video of the match.

The greatest players make a sport feel like a game in the childhood sense, this thing approached with unbridled joy. Alexia Putellas always seemed to play the game with a sense of “Wheeeee!” that is rare in a player of that level, joy unbound by the idea of failure. If you don’t try, you won’t succeed. “I have the skill to execute that pass, so here goes.”

Like any great athlete in any field, she played the game with a bigger pitch. Just like basketball shooters say when they are on one of those nights, the hoop looks like it’s the size of a swimming pool, her quality made the impossible not only possible, but expected.

Her celebration after slamming home the goal that assured the Champions League title became iconic — it was the best doing the best at a moment when the best was required, as much affirmation as execution, an exorcism of emotion from a player who ascended to the summit after starting below ground.

Knowing when to leave is an art. Like Xavi, who left the Camp Nou after a treble celebration, Alexia leaves after a quadruple celebration, and her gold dust flecked boots were all over it.

Athletes are the harshest judges of their performance level, even when it seems like they aren’t, like they are hanging on too long. They know, because they know. The better the athlete, the clearer the knowledge. Great athletes also have egos. Michael Jordan will tell anyone, in a moment of honesty, that he shouldn’t have come back, that the moment when he dropped in the title-clinching shot, pose held for the cameras and posterity, should have been it.

Athletes know.

There is no arguing about the decline of Alexia, something we can admit even as we can appreciate and revere her. The shots that would have been goals that this season went wide or were too soft to bother the keeper, the passes over or underhit or struck a second too late so they were cut out at the defense instead of yet another lustrous assist — the signs were there.

If we could see them, you know she could see them, but also feel them. Someone — memory escapes me who — said they knew it was time to retire when the game started feeling like it was being played at normal speed. This referenced the quality that the greats have, which reduces things to slow motion, like they are the only one moving at normal speed.

She is being quoted as saying that part of why she is leaving is to not stand in the way of the natural progression of the team, also an extraordinary thing, because athletes have egos. They say they are going to “stay and fight for a place” and similar things. The admission that it’s time is rare. And maybe, just maybe, had the team seen failure at that topmost rung, she might have stayed another season.

Maybe.

Barça Femeni is an incredible team. During the match feed, which I couldn’t wait to watch as soon as we returned from Oslo, the commentators were talking about how stacked with young talent the team was, that youth underscoring those statements. Clara Serrajordi, at 18, played a Final like she was a veteran of many more years. Aicha Camara subbed on for Mapi Leon and made the things that the veteran put effort into look easy. Youth will be served.

Perhaps it was less difficult for Alexia to leave because like any proud parent, you watch a grown, successful child do things you could never have imagined and smile in satisfaction. She was there from the beginning, through all the failures, when Femeni wasn’t a colossus, there to raise them up, to present an unassailable level like the sign at amusement parks that read, “You must be THIS tall to ride this rollercoaster.”

“You must be THIS good to do this. Let’s get there together.”

This hits so hard because she was part of the team in a way that transcended being a player. Their excellence was her excellence in that same Jordanesque way, as a team grew with her, learned to excel as she did, finally tapping her on the shoulder and saying, “We’re ready. Thank you for absolutely all of this, but we are ready.”

But even if they are, and they are, it will feel weird for a long time to not have number 11 gliding around the pitch, captain’s armband on, making difficult moments look easy but also getting down and dirty when needed.

She has more football in her, even if not at the topmost level, but it’s hard not to wish she would hang up the boots. Some players don’t feel right in any other shirt, and Alexia Putellas is one of them. She was ours, is ours, will always be ours. Eterna.

I checked set lists, listened to all of his music, read articles, did everything I could to educate myself about a performer who, artistically, I wouldn’t cross the street to piss on if he was on fire.

The show got a rave review, not because of what my views were on his music, but rather did he do the job he was there to do, and how well did he do it?

A classical music critic who I respected a lot, the late Robert Marsh, told me two things about live event criticism:

— Never applaud, show pleasure or scorn. The publicists know where you are sitting, so show nothing.

–The second, most important one was you are there to review the performance, not what you think of the performer.

When Flick selected Ronald Araujo to be in the starting XI against Newcastle, the reviews of his performance wouldn’t really need a match to be written, because they were what people thought about the performer, rather than the performance.

“Pfft. He was pretty good in the air, but that’s about it.”

“He didn’t do anything to help Lamine Yamal in attack.”

“The Newcastle goal was his fault. Just another clown moment.”

After the match, Flick essentially said he was supposed to defend, and defend he did, so he was satisfied.

Nobody else was.

He is a player whose career at FC Barcelona is defined by three moments: the PSG red, the Chelsea red and the Acerbi goal. All of the other good to excellent performances he has delivered for the club he now captains, are immaterial. Supporters expect the worst when they see his name, because of those moments.

Is that correct?

Obviously, no, but correct has nothing to do with logic. Even when you break down what happened with the goals or reds, it’s immaterial to the “reality” of perception. He is bad. Even when he is good, he is just a play away from being bad. Good moments are greeted with silence, because that isn’t what people are there for. They are there for the bad stuff, the Tweets and comments pre-written.

Gerard Martin is another player on the same path. He has to have a fantastic match for people to say “He was decent.” His life has been defined by when he was still finding his legs as a fullback, and got danced a few times by tricky wingers. He is a bum in waiting rather than a fast improving player who Flick now trusts fully.

The weird thing about seeing what preconceived notions tell us to perceive is one of the fascinating things about psychology and how people perceive an event. What we expect becomes what we see, because expecting nothing is a challenge that requires a weird mindset.

“Kid Rock’s music sucks, and because the music sucks, the show sucks,” was always a very useful way to identify critics who weren’t very good, because they reviewed what they thought about the performer rather than the performance.

You could go minute by minute and document the good defensive plays that Araujo made against Newcastle and people would still say that he was poor and the goal was his fault. Psychology can’t be overcome, but asking the question about HOW we see what we see is interesting — at least to me.

My first reaction to seeing him hobbling back up the pitch right before the Newcastle set piece was, “Why didn’t he sub off, I hope he doesn’t try to switch with someone just before the play, because yonder lies madness.”

So when he stopped at the top of the box, presumably to deal with lofted balls or aerial threats that wouldn’t involve him cutting or sprinting on a cramping calf, my reaction was, “Cool.” Because everybody had zones covered, until they didn’t.

My reaction to the play was tempered by the tumble he took before the goal, the calf that was clearly bothering him and the way he gimped up the pitch. So everything that he did made sense.

What others saw was very different, and relates to how everyone sees an event. My mention of Rashford being lazy on the initial pass wasn’t something many mentioned, but it mattered because in the context of a team being a collective that protects individuals, his first reaction should have been, “If the winger gets that ball, Cancelo is in trouble.”

My guess is when managers break down goals, it is likely very different from how supporters break down goals, because managers see the game differently. Flick probably saw all of it, we can surmise, because he mentioned the lack of covering on Barnes.

Cubarsi had an excellent match. Cubarsi also was done for pace on three different occasions, but teammates picked him up by either making plays or working the offside trap. But maybe, just maybe, part of why Cubarsi was so good was because he had a defender on the right side. Maybe. It all depends on what and how you see what you see.

Nobody’s way of looking at an event is right or wrong. It’s just what they see, how they are programmed. “The right fullback is supposed to be primarily an attacker who plays off Lamine Yamal so that he can be at his best.” When a fullback doesn’t do that, they had a bad match. In their context, their assessment of a performance is correct.

Football, for such an objective endeavor, is quite subjective, right down to who performs an individual action and the consequences of those actions. As a fun psychological experiment, ask, the next time you react to a play, good or bad, what your view would be if a different player made that play.

Thirty years of assessing performances with an empty mind and a bloodless pen have made me look at everything in a different way. What happened, and how? The who is irrelevant. For me, it has to be. It’s how I am wired. When someone else who is wired differently suggests a different idea, we discuss it, hopefully with respect and understanding of the other person’s view.

But the biggest challenge in evaluating a subjective event is removing the evaluator from the event. Football, music, dance, visual art, whatever. Asking “What do I think about the performer and how is that affecting my reaction TO the performance” is one of the most useful things we can do as observers.

Asking that question, and answering it, doesn’t even need to change what anyone might think. Just asking the question has value. Back in the day, good copy editors would come back at critics during edits, with something like, “What does this have to do with the performance? This reads like you are putting yourself in the review.”

As critics got questions like that more, they got better at the selfectomies necessary to evaluate events. It’s worth thinking about for all of us.

Players, clubs, reputations, everything goes in and out comes the waste in an ugly process participated in by clubs, media outlets that are the mouthpieces of those clubs, people who prop themselves up as arbiters of various things, and the supporters that latch on like cuttlefish, seeking affirmation in reflected glory. They don’t really know what to think until someone tells them — this player is good, no matter what he does, that player is bad, no matter what he does.

That maw doesn’t know what to do with things that aren’t black and white. A hamstring injury is black or white. But mental illness is also an injury, just as debilitating, just as significant to a player’s health and well-being. But the maw mostly doesn’t really give a shit about that.

Ronald Araujo is braver than any of the people slashing and lashing at him for what he has done, which is to say, essentially, “This is too much, and I am struggling.” He is injured.

People are, of course, using that to sharpen their long knives, to say things such as, “Better off without him,” or “Leave my club,” or “He hasn’t been the same defender anyhow.” It is all done so casually, tossing a player off and aside, then flushing him and his career down the toilet.

Football, that giant, ugly thing that is only infrequently as beautiful and joyful as we like to delude ourselves into thinking it is on the regular, doesn’t care. It shapes how people are thought about by what it says about them.

What is important to know is that mental health issues are related to a great many things, from internal chemistry to susceptibility to things being said and how those things are shaped. Some people don’t care what others say about them, don’t care about the effects of their actions, athletic sociopaths in a way. For others, it matters. They care. Football and a supporter base, a media mass, doesn’t care about any of that as they shape and define what a player is and how he is perceived, without thinking for an instant about the effect on the player and what that might mean.

Many years ago, working the newsroom overnight shift that was one to nine a.m., the phone rang. At that time of the day it was usually people looking to settle a bar bet. On this night it was a young man, wheelchair-bound after an auto accident. He was considering suicide because in his view he had gone from being a hard-working, healthy young man married to a wonderful woman to a useless bum that people had to push around because he couldn’t do anything.

We talked for hours, for most of my shift as we got into how and why he felt that way. He didn’t do it. It was the whisper stream, the people who acted compassionate to his face but said and did things behind his back that stripped away kindness and dignity, that came to define how he felt about himself.

The call ended with him resolving to talk to his wife, talk to his family, deal with the world in a way that allowed him to find space in it. And for days after that I would check the medical examiner’s report for his name. That it never showed up provided some solace even as I could never have any idea about the anguish that made a complete stranger put his life, essentially, in the hands of another stranger at the other end of a phone line.

What people say defines us, like it or not. People are vexed about it on social media when they shouldn’t be. Why? Because it matters to them. Ronald Araujo is, in the eyes of the shit production system that is the Barcelona entorno, a bum. He is stupid, reckless, a red card machine that lets his team down time and again in big matches. He is the reason for the Champions League exits of the past two years. He can’t play a high line, can’t work an offside trap, can’t pass, can’t do anything. Big accounts define him as someone who needs to leave so that he can “find a club that suits his style.”

None of that is true. None of it. But it has become true, has become what Araujo is because his reputation and perception have been shaped. A more favored player in the exact same situation, with the same outcome and the system shapes it differently. “How can the ref make that call,” or “What a soft call at such an important moment.”

Dembele is a bum whose lifestyle led to his being injured all the time. Another player is, “That’s rough luck, I hope his luck changes so that he can become as great as we all know that he can.”

What shapes those situations? The maw.

Ronald Araujo has played his leonine heart out for FC Barcelona, time after time, match after match. There was a time when he was lauded for that quality, that fire, that effort. But since the PSG red card, a bang-bang play that terminated in a soft red, he has become a different player, shaped by those who define such things. He has become a bum, a wastrel, a mess.

We don’t pay attention to structures unless they benefit us. We don’t note that his best years were when he had a functioning midfield and the fullbacks were much better. Because that isn’t part of the game, unless it is for chosen players.

Some players have the luxury of being victims of a system, the “Once x or y changes we will see the full magnificence,” then x or y changes and they are the same player and another excuse comes into play. They are the lucky ones. Players such as Araujo aren’t in that cadre.

What makes it worse is how Twitter, the predominant metaverse of football discussion, functions. Blue ticks are paid for engagement, and you don’t get engagement by bucking trends, by saying what people don’t want to hear. Engagement is money. So he’s a bum. And big accounts are influential because they are big accounts. So it escalates. Ter Stegen is likened to a “terrorist,” Rakitic is even worse. And on it goes, because it has to.

No care, no time is spent wondering what all of that is doing to the player because they are the pawns, the property that is ours to be played with, used and abused as we see fit. We see, hear and read about the deleterious effects that social media, the whisperstream has on ordinary people — the depression, the suicides — and we think, “These players are getting millions. They can take it.” And on it goes.

It takes an immense person to own their frailty, precisely because of that system that will take that admission, spit on it and smear the player with that detritus. But Araujo is brave, extremely brave, for doing that. And his passion and love for the club should never be questioned, even more so because he has said, “I have something preventing me from being my best for my club. I need to fix this.”

The club, the coaching staff, the players are backing him 100 percent because they understand. They have likely struggled with the exact same thing, whether it’s depression around a spate of injuries and wondering if you will be the same again, or a run of bad results that people blame you for. People in the game understand. Araujo, in the arms of the club, will be fine.

It’s the outsiders that need to do a mirror check. People have no idea what they are doing to other people. None. Want to say a player had a bad match? That’s part of the analysis. When it goes beyond that, it’s ugly and cruel. What Tweet is the last straw? People don’t know, nor do they care because social media isn’t social at all. It is fundamentally anti-social in the way it dehumanizes. It’s a bunch of avatars and to hell with them.

Everything about that is wrong. And pretty much everything about the way social media barrages the unfavored is wrong. It’s also potentially harmful. Nothing about any of this will make anyone less horrible, which is the real shame of it all. It should, but it won’t.

Andre Gomes had his issues, and the way he was treated at Everton was beautiful and reassuring. Bojan Krkic had his issues, and we didn’t know about them until long after, but the revelations from those struggles put a lot into perspective. Who else is struggling, and how much do we care?

After all, these players are only the goals they score, the championships they help win, the goals they prevent, the amount to which they allow us to bathe in the glory they created. They aren’t human, so why should anyone care?

Ronald Araujo will come back from this, and when he comes out of the other end, my personal view is that whatever player he is becomes secondary to the human that he will be. Because that is how it is supposed to be.

When a player is injured, people Tweet “anims” even though it’s empty, this thing they are supposed to do. When a player has a different kind of injury, there is no “anims.” There should be. Araujo is injured. Not physically, but nonetheless impeded from giving his absolute best for the club by a physical condition. He deserves and should get our complete support, respect and yes, admiration.

Because since then, increasingly, life lived on the Internet has shaped behavior. When the young man was talking crap to Mike Tyson and got punched in the face, in many ways that is emblematic of life lived on the Internet. You say stuff to people all day, day after day, and don’t get punched in the face. Then you happen to be out in the world, with behavior shaped by life lived on the Internet, and you get punched in the face.

Life lived on the Internet dehumanizes.

Everything.

People aren’t human, they are things, followers, foils or adversaries. The Internet rewards with dopamine hits — followers, reTweets, the approbation that is the coin of the realm. It makes people do and say things that in real life they never would, but Internet life isn’t real even as it becomes real for the people who are immersed in it, but in a selfish way. “I am real, what I feel when people react to my stuff is real, but none of the things I post about are real, really. Just things.”

Which brings us to Marc-Andre Ter Stegen, hashtags and the utter lack of humanity surrounding the situation in Barça Twitter (Barça X just sounds weird, so yeah.) A hashtag campaign has started, has grown increasingly virulent and ugly. A “supporter” of the club has even made a video that is making the rounds, of all of the Ter Stegen errors.

My views on the hashtag campaign, which feels more like a tantrum to me, are clear, and clearly stated: those people are horrible. And they aren’t horrible because they want the club to acquire a new keeper, feeling that the current No. 1 keeper isn’t up to the standard. It’s doubtful that there is anyone at the club or who follows the team, me included, who thinks that Ter Stegen should continue as the starting keeper for FC Barcelona. Cool.

What is happening with this hashtag stuff is a symptom of life lived on the Internet, where people cease to be human. Ter Stegen is just a thing, something to be used to get those dopamine hits. “Yeah, got more likes for my video, or my Tweet calling him a terrorist.”

The problem with that is obviously that Ter Stegen is human. He has friends, a family, hopes and ambitions. He has ideas about his level of play that any human would have. He thinks he’s better at his job than he is, just like the vast majority of people digitally piling on. If people were to meet him in real life, they would probably find that he’s a pretty nice dude. Or maybe not. Immaterial. What is material is that he is a human being.

In my past life as a journalist, my job entailed arts criticism, from visual art to movies. It also meant opportunities to write columns off the news. Invariably, no matter how nasty and vituperative the e-mail, a response brings about an immediate change of tone. “Whoa, shit! There is a human on the other end of this thing!”

What social media does, what life lived on the Internet does, is make people forget that there is a human on the other end of this thing. “I support the club, therefore those things are my property, to do with as I desire.” As a soci for going on two decades, whose dues ostensibly fund the club and its operations at a thimble-like level, my opinions about players, managers, things the club does are many. But the thing I have never, ever forgotten is that the people I am talking about are human. Nothing written by me isn’t something I wouldn’t say to that person’s face. That’s fair.

When we forget that people are human, liberties are taken, and people think it’s okay. One of my favorite thought exercises for people is to ask them what it would be like if, at their job, they were assessed by multitudes, who talked about it on social media. They call you an asshole if you made an accounting error, didn’t perform your job perfectly. Day after day, at work and on social media. You log on and there you are, a hashtag blaring to the world how shitty someone thinks you are, with posts to back up their opinion.

It’s a safe bet that most people wouldn’t like it, would say, “Don’t they realize I have feelings, that my friends and family can see that stuff?”

Well, no, because you aren’t human to them. Twitter makes us all avatars, blocks of type with which people interact, argue with, quote Tweet. Of all the people I have met in real life from Twitter, there was only one where the interaction wasn’t with another human in that human way, and it was weird, and stunted, and brief.

We are each a self-contained world on the Internet, and too often forget what it’s like in the real world, of people and feelings and humans and maybe getting punched in the mouth. That isn’t a good thing.

One person asked me, “What are we supporters supposed to do?” Well, calm down and don’t be horrible, because even the biggest hashtag campaign on the planet will have about the same effect on the FC Barcelona technical staff as farting in the direction of Barcelona and hoping they smell it. They have budgets, and priorities, and ideas about needs. They have talked with the manager who has delivered his ideas about what needs what, and when.

Those people don’t give a shit about your hashtag, or increasingly ugly utterings. Ter Stegen, Araujo have been the targets this season, and both look set to stay at the club. Want to talk about their play, and how them staying means the club isn’t likely to win any silver or Champions League? Cool. You can do that without being horrible, without being inhuman. Really. You can.

Empathy is a muscle, one that is easy to have atrophy in a Darwinian way. Use it or lose it. The Internet doesn’t care about empathy unless everyone is told, by someone with enough juice for it to register, “Hey, you need to be empathetic about this.”

“Oh. Yeah. Okay. Wow, yeah.”

Otherwise, very little registers because the Internet doesn’t make anything real. Or human. It’s for us, by us, about us. The target of our … whatever? Not human, so anything goes. Everything about that is wrong. Will any of it change? No, because of life lived on the Internet. And that is a shame.

Mix in the unknown quantity of Hansi Flick’s arrival, the clear reliance on finding free transfers like Iñigo Martinez to fill gaps in the squad, and a plethora of young but unproven talent, and it honestly hard to imagine how we were even going to finish top 2 or avoid the playoffs in the Champions League. It was less the lack of quality in Barça’s setup than it was the growing pains we were going to experience under a different tactical regime and the reinforcement of rivals.

The arrivals of Mbappe at Real Madrid on a free (with a signing bonus of infinity bajillion euros) and Julian Alvarez at Atletico Madrid for nearly 100 million euros felt like a kick in the teeth given Barça’s financial constraints. The questions about arrivals like Dani Olmo weren’t on fit within the squad or new tactical arrangements, but rather whether we could even field him and Pau Victor at all. How can we splash 65 million euros on a player, given that we were still looking to make up budgetary shortfalls? Indeed, it would take some shenanigans and a couple of unfortunate injuries to get them registered for the first half and eventually some absurd tight rope walking to get them cleared for the second half.

Expectations were low. I can’t point to any now-embarrassing social media posts because I was taking a decent break during my move from The Hell Site to Bluesky, but at least privately I suggested we would go trophyless. And why wouldn’t I? On August 12, Monaco steamrolled us in the Gamper 0-3. We did not feel like a cohesive unit or in any way a team that would make a run for anything. A subsequent loss in the first Champions League match of the new group stage format, also to Monaco, suggested that our “cannot perform in Europe” dynamic was by no means in the rearview mirror and should not be discounted as demonstrating significant problems in squad depth and overall competitiveness.

And then the season started, Lamine Yamal went from “wow, that 16-year old is good” to “Holy crap, that 17-year old is my new religion,” and the team won its first 7 domestic matches. A 4-2 loss to Osasuna at El Sadar felt bad in the moment, but more like an aberration after the next several matches:

5-0 vs Young Boys (CL)
0-3 at Alaves
5-1 vs Sevilla
4-1 vs Bayern Munich (CL)
0-4 at Real Madrid
3-1 vs Espanyol
2-5 at Crvena Zvezda (CL)

7 matches, 29 goals scored, and 5 goals allowed felt incredible. I returned to social media a little bit, saying during the Bayern Munich match that “We are good at football again and it is…I don’t know how to handle this.” And I didn’t. It wasn’t clear then that Real Madrid were a team in trouble (they had lost just once, to Lille in the CL, but had actually outperformed their opponents in almost every metric), but we routed them. It felt fantastic. It felt like we were seriously pushing into a place where we could dream again, not just about the league title we were putting to bed in the first half of the season, but in Europe too.

By late December, we had fallen to 3^rd in the league and flirted with disaster in the Champions League. It felt lucky to be where we were in the CL (2^nd) after being outperformed for much of the match by Borussia Dortmund. Domestically, we were a mess. We lost 4 of 8, including at home to Las Palmas and Leganés, the former of which is officially relegated and the latter of which is 4 points from safety with 2 matches to go, as well as to Atletico Madrid. That last loss is the one that put us in 3^rd and we seemingly cemented our position behind the top 2 with a subsequent draw at Getafe to start the league back up on January 18, but at the same time we were clearly on the up since we won the Spanish Supercopa in Riyadh, smashing 5 past Real Madrid in what could very well have been a thousand goals to 1 had Wojciech Szczęsny not been sent off for a (failed) tackle on Mbappe.

There was a sense of regression to the norm for a few weeks, but after that loss to Atleti in December, the team has not lost in the league again, winning 15 of 17. Both of the draws (home to Getafe and Betis) were statistical anomalies that they should have won given the volume and quality of chances, yet at the same time it was a run that simply felt impossible in early January and a run that, as it went on, felt increasingly likely to end at any moment simply out of sheer exhaustion.

The team has now played 58 matches in all competitions and will reach 60 by the actual end of the season in a couple of weeks. At times they have looked completely worn out and yet also were sprightly against Espanyol in the title-clinching win. They looked as if they could go a full 90 with anyone and, really, if there is a letdown from this season it is in missing that 61^st match. In the 92^nd minute of the Champions League semifinal, we were all mentally filing our plans for the afternoon of May 31, ready to party it up in Munich—Germany has been kind to us on the European stage before, why not again?—and so to have that taken from us at such a late hour hurt a lot more than it might have otherwise.

Yet now that that immediate pain has subsided and even been replaced by the joy of winning a dramatic clasico and then the league in successive matchdays, it is easy to think of this season as an unbridled success. We not only won the domestic double and accented it with a little supercopa victory, we also beat Real Madrid 4 times in a single season for the first time in our history. We scored 16 goals against them! We blanked them at the Bernabeu, hung a manita on them in January, scored a trophy-winning late goal in April, and all but ensured ourselves the league title at their expense in May. And then went to Espanyol and mathematically secured the title there.

Really, what more do you want out of a season?

Yet, we got so much more. We got joy. We were treated not just to Lamine Yamal’s emergence as a precious possibility, but his arrival as a true force of nature. The season began with a need to use him as sparingly as possible and ended with him as our title-winning goalscorer. It simply jaw-dropping what he is capable of, that the academy has produced such a gem again, and that he is hardly the only home-grown star in the squad. Until January, he wasn’t even the only 17-year old star in the squad, thanks to Pau Cubarsi and even then we’re leaving out Marc Bernal, also 17, who was playing extraordinarily until his injury sidelined him for the rest of the season. Bernal isn’t even the only Marc in the squad whose injury looked like it might derail the season, with ter Stegen’s knee exploding and leaving us all wincing not just at the obvious pain, but also at Iñaki Peña needing to step in. And in he stepped, doing a far better job than I expected before he was replaced by Szczęsny coming out of retirement, cigarette in hand, to become a minor Barça legend.

Coming into the year we felt a bit thin, as I mentioned in the first paragraph. By mid September we seemed like we were full of world beaters. Injuries piled up along with the miles on legs, yet the squad never put its head down.

Bernal, ter Stegen, Gavi, Christensen, Pau Victor, Gavi, and Dani Olmo all missed significant chunks of the year with injuries, yet the team put together not just a winning run, but a fun one. Sure, there were moments when it felt like maybe we should do some more defending, especially in the back half of the season, but in the first 20 matches of the year (up through the lost to Atletico), the team allowed 1.15 goals per match. In the last 16 matches, that number fell to 0.81. The team scored 2.6 goals in the first 20 and 2.81 in the last 16. In all competitions the team scored 169 goals, exactly 100 more than they allowed. A goal difference of plus an entire century is absurd and we were blessed to watch it happen.

Before the season, there were fans calling for Raphinha’s ouster. He scored 34 and got a team-high 22 assists.

Well into the season, I, along with a bunch of others, was calling Ferran a dumb lummox made of crap who should be shot into the sun. He scored 19 and got 7 assists, by far his best scoring record over a season, not just for us, but in his entire career.

There were those questioning the wisdom of the Lewandowski signing despite his goal tally last season. He scored 40.

Obviously Lamine Yamal was good, but bagged 17 goals and got 21 assists, which was just a revelation despite the entire season seeming to be a litany of “I can’t wait to see how he’s going to top THAT one.” Well, the answer was his goal of goals to win the league against Espanyol. I can’t wait to see how he tops that one.

Jules Kounde clearly accepted his position at right back and lit up the season, even grabbing 4 goals, including the one to win the Copa del Rey in extra time.

Pedri is a god, full stop. The greatest bargain in Barça transfer history?

Frenkie de Jong seemed on the outs and then he was suddenly indispensable, making 23 starts, most of them in the 2^nd half of season and going the distance in all of the major matches down the stretch except the Copa del Rey final where he put in 84 minutes.

Eric Garcia was destined for Girona until he wasn’t and then he slowly worked his way into the good graces of the manager, ending up with 43 appearances and 17 starts. It felt weird to rely on him at right back for the last clasico and even weirded to realize he was doing a very good job against Vinicius as well as making strong forward runs.

Apparently being named Marc and playing for Barcelona makes you very good, but also you are doomed to get injured. Marc Casadó was billed as the one who would make a huge impact this season, came out flat, and looked decidedly less capable than Bernal before suddenly becoming a fantastic player who understood the assignments and played well. He only made 36 appearances because of injury, but he still has 500 more minutes than both Eric Garcia and Ferran Torres as well as 600 more than Dani Olmo and Fermin Lopez. And he also made an appearance at Canalets after we won the title, singing with the fans late into the night and absolutely endearing himself to me forever. Make him captain. Make him president.

In August I was sure we were decent.

It’s May and now I know we’re spectacular.

What a season, what a ride, what an absolute blast. The trophies feel like something of a secondary thing to the fun I had, but of course winning and getting the hardware is part of it. I didn’t see how we would radically improve by getting rid of Xavi and retaining the same squad, but I was also convinced that Xavi’s lack of willingness to change his assistants was strangling what was a talented group of players. We’ll never know the extent to which the manager changing was the difference and whether or not new assistants would have helped Xavi overcome some of the roadblocks he encountered, but we can still give Flick full credit here. He has really, really done the thing and we can all be proud of the players, the staff, and the club for this season.

Oh and next year in the Camp Nou? I’m giddy already.

In trying to figure out why Hansi Flick’s Barça is like it is, maybe that’s the answer. Kids.

In an interview, Dani Olmo said that the young Barça players make the locker room like a party. Because what else would kids do? Being sensible is for grownups, and there is plenty of time for that.

Late in the Inter match, during that momentous minute, Pedri passed the ball to Lamine Yamal, a pass that came with instructions. Do this. We need time to go away. Pedri, all of 22 years old, gave the ball to a 17-year-old, a kid who was and is, fearless.

So many asked, “Why would you take that shot?” Lamine Yamal would likely answer, “Why wouldn’t you?” PlayStation, social media, fun and bad decisions, kids always seem surprised when things go badly because one of the beautiful things about youth is nothing is ever going to go badly. It never occurs to them.

Flick’s Barça went down 2-0 to Inter at the San Siro, were 2-3 up when things unraveled in a minute. The same team went down 0-2 to Real Madrid, essentially with the league on the line, and in a relatively wee hunk of time, were suddenly up 4-2.

Of course they were.

The second goal was an audacious strike from Lamine Yamal (who else?), a curler hit from an oblique angle, a challenge to the best keeper in the game. “Stop this one, smart guy.” He didn’t. Couldn’t. The shot wasn’t struck with venom, hit just hard enough. The main thing was the curl, off the first touch because controlling a ball is for mortals, people unsure of where they are in life.

Kids make bad decisions, because they’re kids. Lamine Yamal was going to take that shot against Inter because … well … what could happen? A goal. Let’s do this.

Do something. Nothing might be something to grownups, taking the ball into the corner, standing over it, letting time elapse, but where’s the fun in that? It never occurred to him that he wouldn’t score, that the rest of the match would collapse, that it would go into extra time where his team would lose. And maybe, just maybe, it isn’t supposed to, is wonderful that it doesn’t?

Flick essentially handed the reins of the team to kids — Lamine Yamal up front, Pau Cubarsi at the back. They are two of the best players on the team, and also the youngest. When kids are leaders, their senses infuse a team, permeate the room with the scent of impossibility. “Why can’t we come back? There aren’t any rules.”

One of the most audacious things Lamine Yamal did in that Inter match was a snap shot, taken in a single motion that had him act like he was turning away from the Inter goal only to unleash a rocket. Sommer dove and just saved it. It was an astonishing strike.

Aging builds common sense, builds logic, builds fear, limits possibilities. “We tried that once and it didn’t work.” Kids are like, “Well I haven’t tried it. It didn’t work for you, but you’re old.”

Athletics, particularly team sport at the topmost levels, talks about belief. Believing you can do it. What if there is also a quality of not really believing that you can’t, not interested in being told that you shouldn’t, so you act like you can. And you do, often enough to win a domestic triple, to be one minute away from being in the Champions League final, to go undefeated against your club’s historic rival.

When Lamine Yamal scored the goal that curled past Courtois as though on a track, he hit it and started running to the corner to celebrate. He hit it and knew. Could Courtois have done something incredible and somehow saved it? Sure. But he wasn’t going to, because kids also have confidence.

Grownups so often ask kids, “Why would you do that?” The kid invariably replies, “I dunno. I didn’t think anything bad would happen.”

Flick’s Barcelona team has no template for failure. Those kids weren’t around when Valverde’s teams gave up big leads in Europe, weren’t around for any of the Champions League failures except the one under Xavi and even then, it wasn’t their team yet. They were lauded debutantes, given a shot by a manager who needed to do so.

This team is theirs and maybe, just maybe, it does what it does because why wouldn’t it? Two goals down? “So what. We’ll just score three.” “But we’ve never done that before.” “YOU have never done that before. I just got here.”

Kids roll through life with joy. They run, leap, scream, do everything to the maximum because they haven’t learned how to be grownups, how to be tempered by failure. Flick has instilled his team with belief. We talk a lot about the mentality of this team, how it just doesn’t even think it’s done, how it seems surprised when time runs out and they haven’t done it, like, “How did that happen?”

A friend of mine had a daughter, a new driver, who knocked over a post at a restaurant drive-through. She got her food, misjudged the turn and nosed into the post. So she hit the throttle. Seemed easier than backing up, and what could happen? Down went the post. Problem solved. Sure, there was damage, but we can fix that, right? So what’s the problem?

At some point, Lamine Yamal is going to grow up, Pau Cubarsi is going to grow up. They won’t become lesser players, will likely become better players. But you’re only a kid once, only one shot to approach the world as this vast palette of possibilities. As a team leader, you infect and influence. You keep running, and working, and shooting, and pressing, and trying to score. And you score the goal that equalizes and just stand there with your arms folded, like, “Well, what else was going to happen?”

What is difficult for us is to not think, “Well what are they doing that for? You don’t do that.” You don’t come back from multiple goals down, don’t win trophies with a team of kids, geezers and freebies, don’t sweep the season series against your club’s eternal rival, a rival just off winning the league and who added the alleged best forward in football to the roster.

Everything Barça does is slathered in audacity. The high line, the offside trap, passes with the outside of the foot, runs. So many runs made out of belief that the ball will get there. Week after week people said, “Rivals are going to figure it out.” And sure, they lost a few matches but were rarely beaten, rather they lost because of their own errors. Not finishing chances, poor decisions on the ball late in a match. Inter snatched Champions League glory from them but even then if a few players do something other than what they in fact did, the result is different.

Do something. Kids want to do something, to take action. Lamine Yamal will sometimes pick the wrong pass, or the most difficult option. To us it’s “Why would you do that? There is a safer, easier pass.” Kids are like, “Yeah, but it’s gonna be cool when it works. Watch.”

Szczesny, who just a few months ago was strolling the countryside enjoying a cigarette or two, after the Classic ended, just squatted down in front of his goal, in tears as the kids danced. To him it was an incredible thing, something that has been a wonder to experience. Christensen walked down the pitch to get him, playfully stomping the last few steps like, “Hey, it’s party time. Let’s do this,” awakening Szczesny from his reverie.

This has been an astonishing season, one that not even the most bright-eyed culer would have predicted. The team has never stayed down long. The Sunday after a massive disappointment on Tuesday, it showed up and dusted off its rival, coming back from two goals down and setting up winning the league.

“Well, duh.”

Times change. One is now a bum who can’t stop someone’s grandmother from scoring goals, the other a bum who can’t make a pass or hold an offside trap, a sucky defender who should be offloaded soonest, bettered even by … Eric Garcia per some folks.

So what happened? Hansi Flick’s side was off to a gangbusters start in league, winning their first five matches in relatively stress-free fashion. The horrible keeper pulled off some sterling saves, and somehow that defender managed to not concede every time an opponent charged up the pitch.

It’s worth looking back at the goals Ter Stegen conceded this season. The exercise was interesting mostly because my memory isn’t what it was and horrors always need refreshing. Up until his injury against Villarreal, Barca conceded five goals:

1-2 win over Valencia: Open header after Balde and Martinez figured the offside trap was on. It wasn’t. Nice header across goal. Ter Stegen was screwed.

2-1 win over Athletic Bilbao: converted penalty, courtesy of Cubarsi challenge.

1-2 win over Rayo Vallecano: Beaten at his near post. Culpable.

1-4 win over Girona: Came out to play the attacker, rounded and poor cover. Offside call missed, however.

1-5 win over Villarreal: Skinned alive by his defense. Sitter for Villarreal.

Now, those matches all included saves, ranging from solid to excellent. Among the outstanding ones were against Villarreal when the tie was in doubt, a key stop to stymie Girona at 0-2, an acrobatic move to hold out Athletic Club in a narrow win.

After Ter Stegen went out with his injury, things took a turn. Inaki Pena came in, a no. 2 keeper still untested and growing into a role he initially appeared unprepared for. His team went from top of the table to third, looking up at Real Madrid and Atleti and a quality keeper came out of retirement to assume the no. 1 shirt.

Oof. Now, perhaps it would have been worse. Ter Stegen, the worst keeper in history according to many culers, could have kept fit, landing normally after that routine play against Villarreal. Or perhaps a rumble took root and became something it shouldn’t have.

Ter Stegen has been maligned for years, the kind of player greeted with silence when he does something good, as supporters sit in wait for an error, to pounce. Some say he isn’t the kind of keeper who saves matches for his club, despite abundant evidence to the contrary. But what people see, what they remember and what they seize upon to prove a point that doesn’t fully exist are quite different things.

Others say he is 32 and past it, despite turning and lavishing praise on a retired, smoking Szczesny, who is 34. Manuel Neuer is 38, Courtois and Oblak the same age as Ter Stegen.

The German keeper wants to return this season, as his recovery from a torn patellar tendon is ahead of schedule. Reaction among the Barcelona fanbase is, as expected, ranging from chagrin to horror. Suffice it to say, it isn’t something supported by any reality other than that you don’t want a player just off a serious injury, coming back into the side at the part of the season when matches are more important. The team could be fighting for a Liga crown as well as a Champions League title, and it will take time for him to regain match pace.

And his club should be in the market for another keeper over the summer, a young lion ready to test, because Pena isn’t good enough, Szczesny is retired, and stepped away from the game for a reason, and Ter Stegen now has had three serious injuries, all requiring surgery and significant time off.

Ter Stegen and Araujo suffer the identical things at the hands of a fanbase that wants its players to be things that they aren’t. They want defenders to be attackers, attackers to be better attackers, goalkeepers to pass like Pedri and stop shots like Courtois.

Ter Stegen is a passing goalkeeper. Only the successes of the Guardiola teams saved Victor Valdes from the same fate, but nonetheless he was compared unfavorably to shot-stopping whizzes such as Kameni or Casillas.

Araujo has a different problem, stemming from a wayward pass against Paris St.-Germain in last year’s Champions League. His team was on top of that match until Araujo’s pass was intercepted and the PSG counter resulted in a direct red for the Uruguayan. The subsequent comedy of errors leading to the elimination, history tells us, rests with Araujo instead of missed chances, a Cancelo disasterclass over two legs including missed opportunities, leaving Dembele alone to shoot as well as a penalty.

But from that moment on, Araujo became suspect on the ball, a cement-footed doofus who couldn’t be trusted. After his injury, Inigo Martinez came in and Flick had his offside trap dialed in, and culers began viewing a tactic as a proper way of defending.

Araujo returned from injury, was hit with a bad onside call and it went from bad to worse for him. “Can’t pass, can’t hold an offside trap, the club needs to sell him soonest.”

And so it goes. Just as a fit Ter Stegen is the best keeper on the current roster, Araujo is the best defender on the current roster, who proved it time and again upon his return from injury. Because at times, a team indeed has to actually defend when that line drawn across the back of the defense fails.

Araujo has pace, can physically prevent attackers from gaining position without fouling, significantly improved as a passer over the off season. But in Barcelona supporter land, that he could run, win aerial duels against anyone, close down forwards and defend physically has switched from positive to a negative. “He relies on physicality too much, which isn’t good for the defense.”

It’s a crazy world, CulerLand, and one that isn’t looking to get any more sane any time soon. Meanwhile, what of two excellent players who have a perception problem? That issue isn’t going away, but my advice for people is that they go back and watch matches, with an eye toward the performance of both players.

For the time-constrained, there are compilation videos of both Ter Stegen and Araujo.

Ter Stegen is, barring a move to the Saudi League, on his last big contract. Araujo however, is 25 years old and one of the best defenders in the game. His clause is purported to be 60m and he will have no shortage of suitors should he decide to move on in the summer window.

For Ter Stegen, that time is approaching, due to a confluence of age and injuries that diminish a keeper in those physical areas necessary to sustain excellence. The selection of a replacement will need be very careful, because finding a keeper with Ter Stegen’s shot stopping ability and distribution skills will be difficult.

Araujo will be a significant loss that will leave the team poorer as opponents figure out the Flick offside trap, something we are already seeing with second runners and exploiting consistently open wings.

Both will leave the club as victims of perception and a herd mentality that eschews nuance and perspective in favor of a binary judgment that erroneously, to my view, finds both players not up to standard and surplus to requirements.

It’s weird to have been around for 25 of those years, a journey that began with the legendary Rivaldo chilena, an intrigued football neophyte who wanted to know more, to have some sort of a piece of something that could cause such bedlam. “It wasn’t a championship, what was it?”

Things led to things, and a journey began.

FC Barcelona, for all of its complexities, is a pretty incredible institution, one that has survived all sorts of wackiness, survived an assassination of a key figure, bad presidents, financial crises, more bad presidents. And for 125 years, the supporters who came to be known as culers have loved their club.

It’s difficult to explain why football supporters mate for life, what makes people from all over the world gravitate toward a sporting entity. For some it is success, Guardiola and trebles. For others it is magic, Ronaldinho and Messi. For still others, it is family tradition, a Catalan birthright. You support FC Barcelona, you become a soci, you go to matches.

And the larger question is, of course, what do we get out of it? We anguish, weep, scream, throw things. Joylessness is much more a companion than the indescribable joy of ultimate success. The club had a football team that won everything. Six trophies. What a time, we muse wistfully about those days never to be repeated.

What’s the payoff? Maybe, just maybe, it’s the beauty of a shared experience. Fanatic, after all, has fan as a root. We can go anywhere in the world, see someone wearing the iconic colors, smile and exchange nods, maybe stop and talk about matches, players, maybe even (shudder) real life as we get to know someone, our common bond being nothing more than our mutual suffering, week after week, as we watch and hope.

For 125 years, supporters of the club have done that. Through good times and bad, Fascism and murder, years so lean that just making European competition set off wild celebrations, like those smaller clubs that culers now look down their noses at as they celebrate making European competition.

Social media has expanded the reach of FC Barcelona to levels that are, frankly, ridiculous. Someone in Botswana can call someone in Michigan a butthead because he thinks a player should be sold. There are devoted, lifelong culers who have never been to a match. How to explain that to someone who doesn’t understand? How to explain the first time you see a match in the Camp Nou, and hear the anthem.

Tot el camp / Es um clam

None of us presumes to know anything about anything much less magic, about how a club gets attention, then under the skin, then into the blood. It is illogical. And Barça supporters disagree on so much. If you got a room full of them together they couldn’t even agree on where to go for lunch.

And yet, there is that bond. The club binds us together in a way that none of us can explain. It just is. And has been. And most importantly of all, will be. To 125 more, FC Barcelona.

Right before the international break, FC Barcelona went to visit Real Sociedad, all pomped up after tonkings of Bayern Munich and Real Madrid, knocking four goals past each of them, an orgiastic exorcism that could only be more complete with dead demons and exultant clergy.

La Real wasn’t interested. At all. The ensuing 0-1 loss was interesting in the way that losses are more interesting than wins if folks are looking to learn something about what a team needs and how it functions. Finishing the match with zero goals and zero shots on goal might be rather eloquent in the “how a team functions” regard, but the third loss was just as much psychological as the previous two.

La pausa is one of those goofy phrases that like others (tika taka, anyone?), gets sillier with overuse. But it’s relevant here, just as it was in the other two losses this season, to Monaco and Osasuna.

Flick’s approach is dynamic, wanting to get at the opponent with running, pressing, passing and verticality. When an opponent decides to run at Flick’s team with running, pressing, passing and verticality, strange things happen. Rather than calming down, looking for openings to exploit, for the same reasons running, pressing, passing and verticality make Barça vulnerable, they turn the volume up to 12.

The result is head tennis in midfield, runners run amok, surprise goals that aren’t at all surprising given the state of the match, and — this season so far — losses.

Lamine Yamal was absent, and his presence was sorely missed. But Barça, being down to ten with Frenkie De Jong in the XI notwithstanding, had more than enough horsepower to beat La Real. So what happened?

Flickball got out Flickballed. La Real had faster, stronger, more aggressive players more willing to run themselves into the ground. And when signs that such a precise thing was occurring, four sets of fresh legs were subbed in, to allow them to keep running, pressing and making the match frenetic in an unmanageable way.

The lone goal was easy to explain, but it goes beyond Inaki Pena having all the distribution skills and nous of a drunken sailor at 3 a.m. on payday. His clearance was ridiculous, and directly to a La Real player. He was feeling pressure even when there wasn’t pressure, and wanted to just get the ball out of there.

When it pinged right back at them, then to their forward who had been firing warning shots across the Barça bow all match, Kounde needed to put a body on him. He didn’t. That meant Cubarsi had no chance to make a play, and Pena’s shot stopping skills, when a player has a passel of places to put a ball, are even weaker than they customarily are. And there was the goal that turned out to be the winning goal.

Nobody ever said, “What’s the hurry, Bub?” Crosses to Lewandowski were easily parried, La Real got a hustling, diving player in front of every potentially dangerous pass. The one time that anything good happened for Barça came when De Jong did the one thing the team needed someone, anyone to do: he made a run that tilted the La Real press, resulting in a goal that really wasn’t a goal because of the automated offside thingamabob.

That should have been fine, and shouldn’t have been enough to win, except that Barça is still psychologically vulnerable, not in the teeter-totter way of past teams, where the first bit of adversity turns them into a dark cloud of ineffectiveness. This team wants to outdo people, wants to press to get results. In chasing a match, it chases harder and thus becomes even more vulnerable to an opponent such as La Real who, for better finishing and decisions in the final third, would have had two or three more goals.

They ran Barça off the pitch because Barça made itself vulnerable in trying to run them off the pitch. It was funny to watch in many ways because every weakness in Flick’s side was exacerbated. Balde looked like a fullback on a merry-go-round, with no idea what to do with Take Kubo in the same way opponents have no idea what to do with Lamine Yamal.

There isn’t a ball-carrying fullback to bypass that first line of the press, in the style of Pique or more ideally, Umtiti. So everybody has to do more work, finding that sliver of a passing lane before it’s jumped by an opponent, which makes the passes rushed, or depending upon the distribution of the keeper over distance, but in a maelstrom of a midfield, those long balls just fall to opponents, who go running the other way to press an out of balance Barça.

There aren’t wing runners, because wing runners need the ball to run onto, and the midfield is busy trying to get the ball, running for its life, or chasing breaks that it can’t catch.

Dani Olmo coming on provided a brief breath of fresh air before the panic returned, and the match rushed to its inevitable result.

Opponents are going to study that match to find what might be learned from it. And essentially, what is there to be learned? You can press the hell out of Barça, and if you’re lucky enough to capitalize on a mistake, you have to keep pressing, to run yourself into the ground.

But ah, why didn’t Bayern and Real Madrid do that same thing? Because they’re too good. The energy, commitment and selflessness it takes to play a match like La Real or Osasuna played isn’t in the CV of top clubs. Not these days. Their approaches are more conventional, which allows Flickball to Flick.

Barça also needs a left back who isn’t a mess, consistently leaving playing space for opponents because Barça doesn’t have the other thing it needs, which are mids who can run, stop breaks and defend. Pedri is a wonderful defender when he can be proactive, and the opponent isn’t running away from him as fast as he can. Then Pedri is just another slow dude chasing a ball he is never going to catch.

When a team is slow and an opponent is playing fast, it’s even more imperative to play with control and calmness. That didn’t happen.

“But they scored a goal, it just was incorrectly ruled offside.”

Then they didn’t score a goal. And that phantom goal doesn’t mean they weren’t run off the pitch by an opponent who had more energy, was faster, stronger and had a better match plan. Flick will, if he is half as good as we all think he is, sit the team down and say, “This is what happened, here’s how I think we should keep that from happening again.”

There will be ample opportunities for us to see if Flick’s team is capable of learning from its mistakes, because that La Real approach is going to become a blueprint for how to play FC Barcelona, with or without Lamine Yamal.

To repeat: None of this is normal.

In the wake of Barça having a wild week in which they exorcised European demons by putting four goals past Bayern, then four past Real Madrid, as we celebrate the feats of this team it is worth, again, saying, that none of this is normal.

The replays of the stupendous Lamine Yamal golazo against RM were accompanied by that goal probability stat, which rated his goal at 15 percent, a number that seemed a bit high.

He took the pass, controlled and unleashed a perfectly placed shot into the top corner so quickly, from an angle so acute that we could all be forgiven for thinking he was going to reset, that he had drifted too far to be able to do anything with that moment. We were all stunned when the ball made the top corner of the net bulge with a force that made you wonder if it would have kept going, far into the crowd, had the net not been there.

It was not a normal goal, from not a normal player, on not a normal night, on not a normal team. That 15 percent probability stat, in many ways, also speaks to the kind of season that we are witnessing, even in its nascent state.

When Hansi Flick was announced, people had doubts. When reports emerged that he was super excited about coming to manage this team, we wondered why. And it was fair to wonder that. This group was a mess under Xavi, seemingly punching above its weight in getting close to the Liga title and the Champions League semis. What manager in his right mind would be excited about that?

There are managers who are man managers, who aren’t that amazing tactically but know how to create situations for their players to give of their best. There are also managers who are coaches, who work tactics, structure, who improve players and teams but don’t quite have that next level of man management that allows their disciplined teams to reach any kind of pinnacle.

The rare manager embodies both. Pep Guardiola obviously does, so does Hansi Flick, who did at Bayern exactly what he is doing at Barça, but only a fool would have expected that to happen, just as only a fool would assert that anything about what we are seeing is normal.

The undroppable nucleus of a team, if they wanted to take a vacation to, say, the U.S. to have a drinking party, some of them would need fake IDs. Balde, Casado and Fermin Lopez are 21. Lamine Yamal, who spoke in a recent interview about “when he was young,” is 17. At that tender age, he is the best winger in world football. The back line is anchored not by a wily veteran in Inigo Martinez, but by another 17-year-old in Pau Cubarsi. Pedri is 21. Gavi is 20. Marc Bernal, who was looking like a pivote to the manner born before his knee injury, is 17.

Players that young are usually still figuring out what to do, how to play, clamoring for playing time but understanding that they need to wait their turn. Flick came to Barça at a unique time, when almost every position on the pitch was open. Xavi handed debuts to Lamine Yamal and Cubarsi, and they quickly stamped their authority on their newfound roles. So did Bernal, who people thought was one for the future, and Casado, who people thought was one for the future when the other one who was one for the future became one for the more distant future.

None of this is normal.

We all do it, minimizing a bumper victory by saying, “Well, the other team played like crap.” The other extreme is the people who act like this is normal, like a bunch of kids whomping two of the best teams in the world, including one that last year won both Liga and Champions League is in any way normal.

Like that Lamine Yamal goal, or the way Cubarsi manages to, match after match, split lines to create opportunities for the mids, who no longer have to work like dogs to get into position to do their jobs, the way Casado now plays like he has already watched video of the match, is extraordinary.

Barça has done extraordinary things before, obviously. The treble wasn’t a part of the footballing lexicon until Guardiola, then Luis Enrique, crafted teams that won everything. Club academies weren’t celebrated like La Masia, which was even featured on the U.S. television show “60 Minutes.” Academies don’t usually turn out a passel of icons — Messi, Xavi, Iniesta, Puyol, Pique, Valdes. FC Barcelona has done extraordinary things, but with those things comes danger in both expectation and normalization.

Barça railed AlavesSevilla, then came the international break. Post-break Barça teams have traditionally been clunky on the return. We curse the break because it disrupts rhythm and form. Flick’s team returned from both breaks rampant. This week was thought of as a week that would define his team, define anticipations, define how we were supposed to think of them.

Bayern was an eternal bete noire, a harbinger of doom leavened only by MSN thrashing the Guardiola Bayern team. Lopsided scorelines and domination were the word of the day. That match was on a Wednesday. Then Real Madrid was on that Saturday. Holy hell.

Both opponents were dispatched with an ease that you only understood when you watched replays in the calmness of an assured result. Both matches made you think that Barça was on a precipice of collapse, that they could easily have been blowouts if only this or that, or then. Bayern had precisely no good scoring chances. Real Madrid had precisely zero shots on target after what seemed like a first half from hell.

“Flick would be crazy to play his usual high line and offside trap against Bayern, with those fast players.”

Nah.

“Well, but Flick would be crazy to play his usual high line and offside trap against Real Madrid, with Mbappe and Vinicius. It only takes one time getting it wrong … “

Nah.

RM was caught offside 12 times in the Classic, nullifying two goals, both by Mbappe. Twelve. Times. That, too, isn’t normal.

As a former manager, one of the things you learn very quickly is that your job is to make your workers happy. Happy workers will move the building to the left for you, while singing a happy tune. A boss asked me once how a reporter, previously sullen and unproductive, became buoyant and ravenous to be published under my care.

“Nobody ever trusted and had confidence in them before.”

Sometimes, it really is that simple. Flick has a system. The players change, but the system doesn’t. Inaki Pena, much maligned, had a fantastic match against both Bayern and Real Madrid. If the real value of the Szczesny signing was to allow Flick to say to Pena, “I know what people are saying, but you are my guy,” it seems to have worked.

But everybody is playing better. Lewandowski is pichici, knocking in goals with metronomic regularity. The captain’s armband and responsibility has instilled Raphinha with super powers. Martinez has recovered the form that one made him one of the best CBs in La Liga. Balde has improved, Casado plays with a deep understanding, Pedri is now, suddenly, the best midfielder in football.

Some of us were grumbling about Balde this season, and rightly so. In the last three matches we have seen a different, calmer and more effective Balde. Frenkie De Jong came on against Bayern, and was good. He came on against RM and was even better than he was against Bayern.

Managing is about empowering, coaching is about teaching. Flick has built a structure and a system, then empowered his players to excel. Lamine Yamal, after the Classic, said something like, “We are a team who believes in ourselves.” They aren’t playing with a chip on their shoulder. Far from it. They are, however, playing with belief. They don’t get down, don’t get flustered. They have lost this season to Monaco and Osasuna, both surprises for different reasons, and seem to have learned from those defeats.

That a team still coming into its own is this good isn’t normal.

The Bayern match left me speechless. It has been a very long time since culers have been able to anticipate good things from their team, been able to turn on matches with the thought that “Today is going to be a good day.” And we didn’t really realize how long that fallow period has been — at least not for me — until watching the Bayern match almost in stunned silence, anticipating the worst because that is what we have come to expect. “Sure they’re playing well now, but … “

The Classic was breathless, and they got to halftime and we took a breath, like execution had been somehow staved off, and there were another 45 minutes of misery. When Lewandowski notched a ridiculous brace in just a couple of minutes, there were about 30 minutes left, and the DAZN team quipped, “30 minutes or 30 years,” because Real Madrid have a mentality, a match isn’t over, they always come back.

What was so weird about both matches is that the better team won in both instances. Real Madrid in particular, plays in a swashbuckling way. Vinicius creates havoc, other players capitalize, it’s individual excellence that works because normally, a team doesn’t have enough minutes of shutting them down to keep it from happening. Barça under Flick, did.

It is impossible to know what is going to happen with the rest of this season, even as signs are as bright as they have been in a very long time. But this week of absolute delight has been special. Culers haven’t felt this way about the team we love in a very long time, and it’s hard to know what to do with that feeling.

What we do know, and should never forget is that this isn’t normal. Which doesn’t mean that it isn’t wonderful. So let’s just go with that.