What people forget, or maybe choose not to say out loud, is that the supporters who had doubted him were in that stadium too, and in every living room from Rosario to the ends of the earth.

The same country that had looked at him for years and seen a foreigner, a Barcelona player on loan to the national team, was now crying into a sky-blue-and-white shirt with his name on the back. Not all profound love stories start in a magical way.

Some of them start with suspicion, and finals lost to sides that, on paper, had no business being there, and a captain who kept coming back anyway. By the time he lifted that trophy, the argument was over. Not the silly one, the one we have on the internet. The real one. The one between a player and his people.

And here is the part that still makes me smile. It didn’t stop. Football refused to close the book in Qatar just because the chapter was perfect. In the summer of 2022, before the World Cup, they had already beaten Italy at Wembley in the Finalissima, 3-0, a trophy nobody grows up dreaming about and everybody was glad to see in those hands.

Then, in 2023, the Ballon d’Or came again, the eighth, the one that belonged to the World Cup year even if the calendar of these awards never quite lines up with the heart. Six had been the record when he left Barcelona. Eight is the number now.

The club chapter after Paris was never going to look like the Camp Nou years, and it didn’t. Inter Miami, from the summer of 2023, was a different temperature. Easier nights, smaller stadiums, a league still introducing itself to the world.

Some people sneered. I didn’t. A man who has given you twenty years at the very top is allowed to play where his body and his family can breathe. And still, even there, the pause before the pass was the same, the left foot still deciding things a second before anyone else in the postcode had noticed there was a decision to make.

Time came for Messi and found him awkward to deal with. Slower, yes. Less of the punk-rock burst. The brain, though, the cruel little brain that saw the picture before the picture existed, stayed.

Then came the summer of 2024, and another final, because Argentina in this era seemed to live in them. Colombia, in Miami, a match that kicked off late and felt, from the outside, slightly cursed.

Messi went down, the ankle gone, and he watched the extra time from the bench with his face in his hands, the old fear back for an hour: that the story might still find a way to hurt him. Lautaro Martínez scored in the 112th minute, ran to that bench, and Argentina had a 1-0 and a sixteenth Copa América.

He didn’t lift it the way he had lifted Qatar. He didn’t need to. The point had been made years before. This one was just the country refusing to let go of the feeling.

Which brings us, strangely, to the last few weeks. I started these lines in my head years ago, on a night in Porto that I thought was about a stadium. I am finishing them in a week when he has just played his last game for Argentina at the Monumental im a friendly against Benin that was never going to be about Benin.

They called it the last tango, which is exactly the sort of thing Argentina would call it. More than 85,000 in there, the city lit up in those two colours, and Messi, 39 years old, 208 caps, played the full ninety.

Otamendi, leaving with him after seventeen years side by side, headed in the first from his corner. Nico Paz, one of the kids who will have to live with the shirt now, got the second. Then a penalty, the 126th goal, 3-0, and a drone show in the Buenos Aires sky.

He told them he would stay forever if it were up to him, because playing for that team was the most beautiful thing that could happen to a footballer. I believe him. You don’t say that, not like that, after the years he had, unless it is true.

Two and a half months before that goodbye, the last World Cup had ended the other way. A final, again, because of course it was a final, and Spain, 1-0, in New Jersey. He left that one in tears, with little of the magic, an ageing champion who had emptied himself getting there.

It would have been a lie to pretend the film only has the scenes we like. The 2007 final against Brazil, 3-0 in Venezuela, the Germany game in 2014, the two nights against Chile, the ankle in Miami, the loss this summer: they all sit in the same career as Lusail. That is the deal. You don’t get the triumph without the rest of it. He knew that better than any of us.

People will ask, now that the Argentina chapter is actually closed, where he sits. I said at the beginning that I will not claim ownership of the earliest opinion. I still won’t. Pelé exists, and Maradona exists, and they existed in worlds with different defences, different balls, different ways of being kicked.

Comparing across eras is a mug’s game, and also the game we all play, so we might as well be honest about it. What I will say is this. No player I have watched, and I have watched a few, has bent a match to his will for as long as he did, in as many different ways.

Zidane on his night he was untouchable, but the night ended. Ronaldo was unbelievable, and then the body betrayed the song.

Messi was something quieter and, in the end, more frightening. A man who could win you a final with a dribble, or with a pass you only understood on the replay, or by standing over a free-kick and making the wall feel silly. Twenty years at the top.

The line I wrote earlier, that no great player stays there throughout a career, still feels true. He is the exception that proves it, not the rule that kills it.