The moral of the story? Never, ever, write off Cristiano Ronaldo
We forget, don't we? We forget... by accident or by design, we just forget.
We are such a cynical species.
He's been pushing the boundaries of sporting excellence for over a decade now, he's been making numbers posted by yesteryear legends look puny and immaterial, he's been toying with everyone, he's made the world's toughest club competition look like his private pool party...
And yet, we doubted him.
After a horrendous start to the 2017-18 season, where his tally of one goal in nine games for Real Madrid in league competitions was mocked by all and sundry, where that remarkable statistic of one goal scored for 55 shots taken was thrown in his face, the barrage of vitriol thrown at him reached an all-time high.
In one game he missed an open goal - from two yards out... the world couldn't stop laughing. That's just how it is, isn't it? The pedestal is built only to be torn down, the higher it is, the more gleeful the act of tearing it down...
He'd still managed to create a new record - one for scoring in each game of the group stages of the Champions League... but that was dismissed with a wave of a hand and a snide remark, 'penaldo', 'tap-in-aldo', 'only scores against these East European minnows' the mockery knew no bounds... Real Madrid fans wanted him out, accusing him - and his selfishness - to be the pivotal reason behind their team's alarming dip in form, Barcelona fans couldn't stop laughing - and because those two races of human beings occupy more mass and time on this planet than any other we were all drawn into it... and we decided that he was past his prime.
Always a divisive figure who's built his brand on his hubristic personality and on his ability to push people to two extremes - you either hate him, or you fall madly in love with him - he'd managed to do the impossible. Unite everyone, almost, in their assessment of him. And as it is bound to happen when the mob decides - there was nothing positive in their assessment.
He was done for. He had become too wasteful, too selfish, too cranky, too melodramatic... too old.
We forgot the last ten years, we forgot the 400 odd goals he'd smashed in for Real Madrid, hell, we forgot last year, last season - when he shrugged off an equally poor start to almost single-handedly lead Real Madrid to their 12th European Cup.
And we wrote him off.
Even when he started 2018 ominously, scoring 18 goals in 11 La Liga matches, scoring 3 of the 4 goals Real Madrid scored against Paris Saint-Germain to put them back in their place, the praise was grudging.
Xavi, that wonderfully elegant footballer and utterly boorish man, encapsulated this with a remarkably dismissive one-liner "What did Ronaldo do, score a penalty and a knee goal?"
He was 33, had come back from one goal in La Liga in November to a fairly ridiculous 22 by March, still lead the Champions League scoring charts with 12 goals (in just 8 games, by the by) but even that was not enough to sate our bloodlust. He had been so good, so near-perfect for so long, and we couldn't wait to take him down to our level.
So, on a rainy, blustery, night in Turin, in front of a packed Juventus stadium - all of them catcalling, whistling, and booing his every touch - Cristiano Ronaldo decided to do what Cristiano Ronaldo does best.
Astound us.
And shut the doubters the f*** up.
If his first goal was one for the footballing purist, a study in the high-art of in-the-box finishing (the movement just before the run, the run itself, the outside of the boot smack - watch it in slow motion, watch it again and again, teach it in academies... that's how you finish), the second one was for all of us.
If you have a functioning adrenal gland, if you have hairs on the back of the neck that don't need crutches to stand up, if you have skin that understands what goosebumps are... it spoke to you.
When he made contact with Dani Carvajal's hopeful punt into the box, his body was 4.63 feet above the ground, parallel to it, in a delightfully straight line, his leg - extended perpendicularly up - was an astounding 7.81 feet up in the air. (Remember, the crossbar itself is just 8 feet tall...); and he hit it with the sweet spot of those customised CR7 Mercurials. He utterly, brutally, beautifully hit it.
As Andrea Barzagli looked on open-mouthed, as Gianluigi Buffon looked on with an expression of "what in the F***", as Zinedine Zidane scratched his magnificent bald pate and made that universal symbol of 'WOOF', the stadium - to a man - stood up to applaud what they had just seen.
There are few sights in sport, in human endeavour, that is as viscerally thrilling as a cleanly struck bicycle kick, an overhead... even fewer have ever struck one better.
It was some goal.
Beyond that sudden rush of blood that it caused to anyone who saw, it was also a reminder of how one man had so successfully married iron-hard-determination with the soul of a footballer who is special, whose talent knows no bounds, whose skill is up there with the best.
He was given no chance in Madeira, often overlooked for passes by older boys, bullies, who felt age bestowed some form of primal power - so he took it upon himself to make sure he scored every time he got the ball.
He was homesick in Lisbon, but he buckled down, playing till his skinny legs dropped.
He was derided in the United Kingdom, ridiculed for his step-overs and his Maggi-blonde-highlights and his reluctance to do things the good ol' British way.
He has repeatedly been criticised by the world's most spoilt sporting audience for his selfishness, his arrogance, his unwillingness to celebrate a teammate's goal with the same zest as he would his own.
He's overcome all of that.
What the hell gives any of us the right to tell him when he's done? What gives us the temerity to tell him that he's not good enough anymore?
We really don't respect him enough.
We say he's just a finisher - forgetting that goals are at the end all that matters in football. We say he's playing in a league that's always just a two-horse race - forgetting that it's him and that other magician who have made it a two-horse raise.
Ronaldo has paid for his consistency with our reluctance to acknowledge him as one of the true, absolute, greats of this game. He's paid for it by building up that unquenchable thirst of "I want to see him fall, I want to see him humiliated" in the dark conscious of the mob... and it's a goddamned pity.
Hell, we'll forget this soon enough... when he scores a 'tap-in' in the second leg or a penalty against Barcelona at Camp Nou, we'll roll out those tropes again, that he can't score by himself, that he needs good players around him, that he's just a goal-scoring machine and nothing else (as if that's even a f***ing insult).
Rest assured, though, Ronaldo will be out there - football's version of Michael Jordan, perfecting himself as he gets geed up by the negativity of the statements about him, taking everything as a slight and using that as a fuel to push himself further, to hit sporting heights few human beings have even had the courage of dreaming about - all the while muttering to himself... "Go on now, write me off nah."