A Suspension at Verona, a Crown in December

A Calendar Split Down the Middle

The star was not on the shirt yet. It would go on there the following May, and by then the whole peninsula would agree it had been coming for years; through 1978 it existed only as work in progress, assembled week by week out of parts that looked ordinary in the hand. The year itself lay across two campaigns the way the Po lies across the plain: one water, two landscapes. Spring belonged to the last months of 1977-78, Nils Liedholm's first season back on the Milan bench; autumn to the opening of 1978-79, the season that would end, the following May, with the tenth scudetto and the first star sewn above the badge. The Swede had been ours before — a player from 1949 to 1961, a coach again in the mid-sixties — and his return in 1977 had the quality of a man walking back into a house he had helped build and finding the furniture moved. Above him sat the president, Felice Colombo. Out on the pitch the armband lay where it had lain since the sixties, on the arm of Gianni Rivera.

Beyond the touchline, 1978 handed Italy a calendar nobody wanted. On 16 March the Red Brigades ambushed Aldo Moro in Rome, killed the men of his escort and carried the former prime minister into fifty-five days of darkness; on 9 May his body was found folded into a car, and the anni di piombo had their blackest date. Before the year was out the Church would bury two popes and elect two — Paul VI dying in August, John Paul I reigning thirty-three days, Karol Wojtyla emerging in October as John Paul II — while in Argentina Enzo Bearzot's Italy charmed the World Cup and finished fourth, a placing that felt like a promise. In the flats of the industrial capital, families took all of it in from the same corner of the same room. What the rossoneri were quietly assembling would give the city one of its few uncomplicated joys.

Stopping Everyone, Finishing Nobody

The 1977-78 season closed with Milan fourth on 37 points — twelve wins, thirteen draws, five defeats, thirty-eight goals scored and twenty-five allowed — and the thirteen draws hold the whole flavour of the thing: a side that could stop almost anyone and finish almost no one. The unbeaten autumn that had briefly carried them to the top belongs to the previous year's chapter; by the time the new year's fixtures began the question was no longer whether the title could be won but whether the appointment with Europe could be kept.

January came on thin rations: a 1-1 with Verona at home on the 8th, a 2-0 defeat in Rome to Lazio a week later, a 0-1 at San Siro against Napoli on the 22nd — and then, as if the team had grown bored of its own austerity, a 5-1 demolition of Fiorentina on the 29th, the one afternoon of the spring when the scoreboard behaved like an opera. February and March went back on rations: 1-1 at Genoa, 0-0 with Juventus, a 1-0 over Roma, a 0-0 derby with Inter on 12 March in which two great houses exchanged formalities and nothing else. April brought a fine 1-0 at Perugia and a 1-1 with Torino, and the season's strangest symmetry besides: both of Milan's defeats after the winter came at home, 0-1 to Atalanta on 16 April and 0-2 to Lazio on 30 April, as though the concrete terraces of San Siro had wearied of the diet. The campaign closed 1-1 in Naples on 7 May. Two days later the country found Moro's body, and football lowered its voice.

The attack made Liedholm's argument for him. The leading league scorer, with eight goals, was Aldo Maldera — a left-back. Rivera, from midfield, added six. When your most dangerous finisher is a defender arriving from behind, either your forwards have retired or your coach has understood something about geometry that the rest of the league has not; with Liedholm it was always the geometry. Enrico Albertosi kept the goal, Fabio Capello and Rivera kept the midfield in order, and fourth place carried its practical reward: a passage into the UEFA Cup.

A Suspension, and the Boy Who Filled It

The season's true event went unprinted. On 23 April 1978, at the Stadio Bentegodi in Verona, in the third-last round, Maurizio Turone — the regular sweeper — was suspended. Liedholm, who trusted young legs the way a vintner trusts young vines, on evidence rather than sentiment, reached into the Primavera and brought out a slight boy of seventeen, two weeks short of his eighteenth birthday, born in the May of 1960: Franco Baresi. Milan won 1-2, the goals from Bigon and Buriani, and Serie A had acquired, without ceremony, the man who would define the art of the libero for a generation.

The detail that gives the afternoon its ache is what came before it. Inter had looked at the boy and sent him away — too frail, they judged — while keeping his elder brother Giuseppe, Beppe, for themselves. So Franco crossed the city to Milan instead, and the scales of that decision would take twenty years to finish tipping. There was no ceremony to the debut at all: he was simply told he was playing, was named in the starting eleven, and went through his ninety minutes with a calm that made the veterans around him look like the nervous ones. From that April afternoon he stayed a rossonero for the next twenty years — more than seven hundred games, six scudetti, and the captaincy that made him, simply and forever, il capitano.

Three Workmen's Names

The summer's business was carpentry, not marble. Out went Giuseppe Sabadini and Turone, both to Catanzaro — the sweeper's April suspension having opened the door through which his successor had already walked — and out too went Egidio Calloni, to Hellas Verona. In came Walter De Vecchi from Monza, Walter Novellino from Perugia and Stefano Chiodi from Bologna: three workmen's names, not one of them a headline, all of them chosen the way a foreman picks a crew — for what they do up on the scaffold, not for how they read on the letterhead. Liedholm was not assembling a galaxy of stars; he was tuning an orchestra, and the autumn would show how finely.

Played Twelve, Lost One

The new season opened, as Italian seasons then did, with the Coppa Italia's late-summer groups, and Milan gave them the attention of a man reading the newspaper at a family lunch: a 3-2 win carried off at Lecce on 30 August, a 3-0 over Foggia on 3 September, a 3-1 defeat at SPAL on the 10th, a 2-2 with Catanzaro on the 17th — five points, second in the group behind Catanzaro, eliminated. Nobody mourned. A cup is a garland in some seasons and a distraction in others, and Liedholm had evidently decided which sort of season this was going to be.

The league was another matter. From October to December Milan played twelve and lost once: 1-0 over Avellino, 3-0 over Roma, a 0-0 with Ascoli, a 3-1 won away at Atalanta, a 4-1 over Fiorentina that echoed January's opera. The single stumble came in Turin on 5 November, Juventus 1-0 in the top-of-the-table meeting — a reminder, delivered in the old rival's dry handwriting, that nothing would be given. Milan answered as champions answer: 1-0 over Inter in the derby, a 3-2 carried off at Vicenza, draws in Naples and at home with Perugia, 1-0 over Torino, and a 3-1 at Verona on 17 December to close the calendar. When the winter break came, Milan sat at the head of the table with 25 points: campioni d'inverno, winter champions — a title the Italians invented precisely because hope needs a name in December.

The goals, meanwhile, had found new addresses. Bigon would finish the season with twelve in the league; Chiodi, the quiet signing from Bologna, with seven in the league and eleven across all competitions; and Maldera went on being the most dangerous left-back in Italy, arriving late from the shadows like a thief who holds a season ticket. But the deeper truth was defensive: across the whole campaign this Milan would concede only nineteen goals, and a side that concedes nineteen does not need poetry in attack. It needs punctuality, and it had it.

The Screen at the Palasport

Of all the autumn's afternoons, keep 12 November. San Siro held about fifty thousand for the derby, and more than thirteen thousand others watched it on a giant screen at the neighbouring Palasport — a city that could not fit its own passion into one building. Inter lost Alessandro Altobelli in the 40th minute, sent off for reacting to a foul by Collovati, and early in the second half the game found its sentence: De Vecchi, the summer workman from Monza, delivered the cross, Chiodi rose to flick it on, and Maldera — who else, in this of all years — headed the only goal. Milan 1, Inter 0.

A second story was being written in the margin. This was the first Milan derby to put the Baresi brothers on opposite sides — Franco in red and black, Beppe in blue and black — the two halves of one Lombard footballing family divided by a scout's misjudgement. Football is full of parables and most of them are false; this one was walking round the pitch in boots. The club that measures a boy's frame gets a good player. The club that measures his understanding gets a monument.

The Cold at Maine Road

Europe administered its customary lesson in humility. The UEFA Cup run had begun nervously — a 1-0 over Lokomotíva Košice at San Siro on 13 September, a 0-1 away a fortnight later, survival only on penalties — before finding better manners against Levski Sofia: a 1-1 in Bulgaria on 19 October, then a 3-0 at home on 1 November. Then came Manchester City in the third round, and the two away goals of a 2-2 draw at San Siro on 23 November travelled to England ahead of the team. At Maine Road on 6 December, in a cold that got into the seams of the shirts, City won 3-0 and Milan's European year was finished. At home the elimination was received with something close to serenity: the side had one obsession now, and it wore the number of a tenth title.

What the Following May Collected

Everything 1978 built was collected the following May. The collecting, though, is not this chapter's to perform: the last Sundays of that campaign, the numbers that settled them and the farewell that came folded inside the celebration are set down in their own year, and the reader will find them there. What belongs here is the building.

No trophy was lifted inside its twelve months, and 1978 may still be the most consequential trophyless year of the club's first century. It gave Milan a seventeen-year-old sweeper at Verona in April and a winter crown in December; it took a country's worst spring and answered it with a city's best autumn. Twelve months later the needle went in above the badge — the star that Italian football awards for ten titles, and only Juventus and Inter had sewn one on before — and it has never come off since. At the Bentegodi, in the third-last round of a fourth-place season, the team sheet had carried a name nobody in the ground had any reason to remember. It is the only name from that April anyone remembers now.