This wasn’t just a victory, it was an exorcism Oles rang out around the Olympic stadium as Barcelona laid ghosts high on Montjuïc Hill.

Bayern Munich, the team they couldn’t beat, the ogres who had gone eight past in Lisbon, they beat six times in a row, with an aggregate score of 22-4, and they hadn’t even conceded that in the last four times. met, the team that was just too good, left here in pieces, expertly cut apart. Barcelona broke through them four times, Raphinha scoring a hat-trick and Robert Lewandowski getting another in a 4-1 win.

“You owe us something,” Barcelona president Joan Laporta had told Hansi Flick; here the coach who, like Lewandowski, had been on the other side the night of that 8-2 humiliation, the ultimate symbol of the Catalans’ decline, repaid them in full. “It’s not about the past; it is about the here and now,” he had emphasized.

Here and now his team is looking really good again. Ten years since they last won this match, how they needed this. However they did it, and exhibition in incision.

This was a football match played on the top of a cliff, and all the more fun was the sense of danger with every move. So determined was Barcelona to play high, so willing was Bayern to do something similar, that it produced a game that was in the narrowest of spaces, an abyss on both sides.

The threat was always there, not least because far from pushing around the abyss and nervously looking down, they sprinted around it, fighting for every inch where there was no space and the chance to clear the pass. that gave them the chance to run past that line, where there were a lot of them.

Barcelona were the first to do this, after just 45 seconds Alejandro Balde found Lewandowski, who resisted the challenge to drop the ball to Pedri, who passed it to Fermín López. His pass was fantastic: Raphinha sprinted free, went around Manuel Neuer and made Montjuïc erupt. And so it began, a beautiful and very fun line that was trodden by both teams.

Bayern then took advantage and Harry Kane headed in to make it 1-1 after six minutes, or so he thought. The VAR ruled it due to offside, but ten minutes later it did not. This time it was Serge Gnabry who got behind Barcelona and provided the cross, while Kane curled a volley past Iñaki Peña.

Chasing offside is a policy – Barcelona have caught their opponents more than twice as often as anyone in Europe this season – but at this stage it felt like an excessive risk, unable to get to the passer quickly enough to make it effective.

Bayern had this in their grasp, more chances seemed like a matter of time, Kane’s beautiful ball to Raphaël Guerreiro almost set up the second. And yet they too stepped high – if not quite that high – Barcelona began to find a way into the game, inch by inch, and then suddenly with jumps of 40 meters, and it was the Bavarians who would be caught.

The first time they did it, it was with a simplicity that infuriated Vincent Kompany, with the hint of a push, which it did. Lamine Yamal made a pass forward and two lines eliminated. Kim Min-jae jumped and misjudged the flight. López, hovering behind him, one hand in the back, turned, ran into the area and lifted the ball past Neuer. And Lewandowski put the ball into an open net.

This was a plan, and it was coming, to be executed again with a precision that would prove breathtaking, in a flash from one end to the other.

Another goal followed just before half time. Pressed deep in his own half, Marc Casadó looked cornered, but he worked his way out and hit a beautiful long diagonal ball to Raphinha. As he ran to the edge of the area, he fired a shot between Dayot Upamecano’s legs that flew into the far corner.

And so, as Bayern looked for a way out after half-time, they did it again. Lamine Yamal’s beautiful ball swung into the space on the left and Raphinha was away again, guiding a perfect finish past Neuer.

What a night it had been, a tribute to the winger who had been pushed to the door. Freed and embraced, life is different now. For all of them.