Eight Months After the Flare

The flare left the Curva Nord in April and came down in an arc that everyone in the stadium could follow with their eyes. It landed on Dida's shoulder. He went down. The referee took the players off. Milan were 3–0 up on aggregate and the tie was already over, and still it ended like that — a Champions League quarter-final abandoned, a goalkeeper burned, a city's football reduced to something you apologise for.

Eight months later, on a grey Sunday in December, Dida walked back out at San Siro and turned to face that same stand.

This time the fixture was only a league game. Only, in the way that a Milan derby is ever only anything.

Inter came into it carrying something heavier than the table said. They had not beaten Milan in three years. Not once since 2002 — through the Champions League semi-final of 2003, through the shame of the April before, through every version of themselves Roberto Mancini had tried to build. Milan had Kaká and Shevchenko and Nesta and Pirlo, a team a season and a half removed from Istanbul, still chasing Juventus at the top. Inter had Adriano, who at twenty-three could still make a football look like it had personally offended him.

Seventy-six thousand people came. It took twenty-four minutes to get strange.

Nesta's arm caught the ball in the box. Penalty, Inter. Adriano put it away.

Fifteen minutes later, Adriano's arm caught the ball at the other end. Penalty, Milan. Shevchenko put it away.

Two identical crimes, two identical punishments, one apiece, and the same man in the middle of both — first the executioner, then the accused. If you had scripted it nobody would have run it. Half-time: 1–1, and the whole stadium had the feeling of a game that hadn't decided what it wanted to be yet.

It decided in the fifty-ninth minute. Adriano stood over a free kick and hit it low and hard into the six-yard box, the way you'd throw a punch rather than deliver a cross, and Obafemi Martins — nineteen years old when Inter signed him, still built like a sprinter who took a wrong turn — was there for the tap-in. 2–1. The Curva Nord went up.

For twenty-four minutes it stayed that way, and you could feel the whole ground trying not to believe it yet.

Then, the eighty-third minute: Pirlo, a free kick, the kind he used to hang in the air like a held note. Jaap Stam rose above everyone. 2–2.

And there it was. The old story, arriving on time. Inter lead, Inter concede, Inter learn again what they already knew about themselves. Three years without a derby win, and here was the ninety-first version of the same lesson.

Except the game didn't end.

Ninety minutes and one. A corner, Inter's last real chance, and Juan Sebastián Verón — thirty years old, written off in England, quietly having the best months he'd had in years — put it into the box.

Adriano jumped.

He was not a header of the ball. He was thunder and left foot and shoulders, a striker built for violence at ground level. But he came off the floor and met it and put it down past Dida, and San Siro did the thing that San Siro does maybe twice a decade: seventy-six thousand people making one sound.

3–2. The Nerazzurri quarter of the ground did not empty for a long time.

What happened afterwards complicates it, the way everything from that season is complicated. Inter finished third on merit — seventy-six points, behind Juventus on ninety-one and Milan on eighty-eight. Then Calciopoli arrived in the summer, and the wiretaps, and the point deductions, and on the twenty-sixth of July 2006 the FIGC handed Inter a scudetto they had not won on the pitch. Seventeen years since the last one, and it came in a courtroom.

People still argue about that title. They will keep arguing about it. But nobody argues about the eleventh of December.

That one they won in front of everybody, in ninety-one minutes, with two penalties for the same offence and a header from a man who didn't head the ball, in a stadium that had spent eight months being ashamed of itself.

Some afternoons the football gives you back what the football took away.