Without any doubt, the watching world yearned for La Liga's top four either to surge or to pratfall at the weekend -- it wanted a definitive move towards triumph or disaster instead of a pair of draws between Barcelona, Atletico Madrid, Real Madrid and Sevilla which allowed people to claim, falsely, that we were left with mere status quo.
Nevertheless: anyone who failed to notice that there were two absolutely rock 'n' roll moments, at Camp Nou and the Estadio Alfredo Di Stefano, which deserve to remain iconic for many years must be an emotionless, desensitised automaton who doesn't deserve to watch Spanish football. Particularly if these two sensational snapshot-moments end up propelling Atletico to only their third league title in nearly half a century.
The stage was set. The tension was already Hitchcock-level as we waited to discover whom, if anyone, would suffer from vertigo and topple over.
Not Atleti's giant Slovenian goalkeeper Jan Oblak who may never have made a better, more important save in his entire life than he did from Lionel Messi.
Nor the referee from Sunday night's ultra-dramatic and controversial 2-2 draw between Spain's reigning champions and the reigning Europa League holders Sevilla. He's called Juan Martinez Munuera and you won't know him as well as you do Oblak. He was born two days after the 1982 World Cup final in Spain, when Italy beat West Germany 3-1. His dad's a ref too, he's an ex-cop and because on Sunday night he joined Oblak in defying expectation and doing what he's been training to do since he was just a boy, he's arguably public enemy No. 1 in the world of Madridismo.
What unites both Martinez Munuera and Oblak was that the pressure gauge on their respective worlds suddenly surged to the red-zone marked 'perfect storm-ready to explode!' this weekend. But they held firm. If either had failed to perform with as much excellence as they did then then digesting that failure would have stung them bitterly -- probably for a lifetime.
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