They say football is the only place where gods grow old in public. Cristiano Ronaldo always knew it, and that is why he kept playing like someone fighting against the clock with headers, with sprints, with goals he no longer needed but that his soul still needed.
In Dallas, beneath the roof of AT&T Stadium, the dream slowly went out, the way the things one loves go out: without scandal, with a goal by Merino in the ninetieth minute that took from Portugal the last door to the World Cup. Spain, the eternal neighbor, the eternal rival, won by the narrowest of margins, one to zero, and with that goal also closed an era of football.
Cristiano had said, laughing so as not to cry: “I hope it is not my last match, I hope they keep killing me”. But destiny does not always grant rematches. It was over. The dream of the cup he never had was over, the only one he lacked, the one no goal-scoring record could buy for him.
And then what happens with the greats happened: he did not leave angry, he did not blame the referee or the wind. He walked toward the stands, greeted one by one those who had shouted for him for twenty years, and there, in front of everyone, unashamed of his tears, he cried. The boy from Madeira who made himself a giant cried, the man who already knew that time wins matches too cried.
All of Portugal applauded him as he left. They were not applauding a defeat: they were applauding an entire life laid out on the grass, the final period of a poem that began more than two decades ago and that today, at last, in Dallas, found its final line.
