Deadline Day, and Two One-Nils in November

One Point, and What It Bought

One point. Fifty-five for Milan, fifty-four for Chievo, fifty-three for Lazio, fifty-two for Bologna — and because the fourth chair in Serie A came with an invitation to the Champions League, that single point was worth more than the fifty-four gathered before it. Fourteen wins, thirteen draws, seven defeats; forty-seven goals scored, thirty-three conceded. Read out flat, the season of 2001-02 sounds like modesty. It was in fact a resurrection, and Milan spent the rest of 2002 proving it.

The resurrection had begun in early November of the old year, when Fatih Terim was dismissed after a poor start and the club handed the team to Carlo Ancelotti. He was given expensive players and no notion of how they were meant to fit together, which is the hardest inheritance in football, and he went at it the way the cooks of his own Po valley go at a difficult sauce: not inventing, but reducing — clarifying, stirring without vanity, refusing to be hurried until the thing consents to become itself. By June the reduction had a shape. By September the shape had a European address, and Milan, after a period in the provinces of the European game, was readmitted to the rooms where the important business is done.

Over it all presided Silvio Berlusconi, who in 2002 held simultaneously the presidency of the club and the office of Prime Minister of the Republic — an arrangement the historians may argue over at their leisure, but which that year was simply the condition under which Milan operated. On the pitch the captain's band stayed where it had long lived, with Paolo Maldini; and 2002 would ask of Maldini a renunciation that no fixture list records.

The Spring of Near Things

Spring offered Milan two roads to a trophy and closed both with courteous firmness. In the Coppa Italia the semi-final brought Juventus to San Siro on 23 January, and Juventus left with a 2-1 win; the return on 6 February ended 1-1, and Milan were out, 3-2 on the aggregate — beaten not by a catastrophe but by a slow leak, which is the more Italian way to lose, and the harder to forgive oneself.

The UEFA Cup travelled further and behaved more strangely. In the round of sixteen Milan went to Roda JC Kerkrade on 19 February and won by a single goal; nine days later at San Siro they contrived to lose by a single goal after extra time, and the tie had to be settled from the penalty spot, where Milan prevailed — a small parable on the danger of assuming that the second helping will taste like the first. The quarter-final against Hapoel Tel Aviv was staged on neutral ground in Cyprus, where Milan lost 1-0 on 14 March; the San Siro return on 21 March was won 2-0, and the 2-1 aggregate carried the rossoneri into a semi-final that would administer the year's most useful lesson.

The lesson arrived on 4 April in Dortmund, wearing yellow, and it was given without anaesthetic: Borussia 4, Milan 0. The return at San Siro was won 3-1, gallant and insufficient in equal measure, and Milan went out on aggregate to spend the summer considering the difference between a good team and a serious one. Andriy Shevchenko had at least kept his own count honest: fourteen goals in Serie A, seventeen in all competitions, top scorer of a season that opened in confusion and closed in credit.

A Golden Goal in the East

The summer belonged to the World Cup, played at the far end of the morning in Korea and Japan, where Italy travelled as contenders and came home as plaintiffs. On 18 June, in the round of sixteen, the co-hosts South Korea beat the azzurri 2-1 by golden goal — that briefly fashionable instrument of sudden death — and the name of the referee, Byron Moreno, entered the Italian vocabulary as a curse with a long shelf life. Whether the grievance was justice or consolation is a thing each tifoso settles privately, according to his own digestion; what is beyond dispute is that the wound was real and did not close.

For Milan the deeper consequence was quieter and arrived almost at once. Immediately after the defeat Paolo Maldini, eight days short of his thirty-fourth birthday and the most-capped Italian in history, retired from international football. He had worn the azzurro shirt a hundred and twenty-six times; there would be no hundred and twenty-seventh. A nation lost a monument, and Milanello got the whole of him back — every summer, every long flight out and back, every hour of recovery no longer owed to anybody else. The autumn to come would show precisely what that was worth.

The Captain Who Did Not Want to Leave

Every summer market produces one story that is really a novella, and in 2002 it had the face of Alessandro Nesta. He had captained Lazio since 1997; he had lifted with them the Cup Winners' Cup of 1999 and the scudetto of 1999-2000; he had turned away suitors with the serenity of a young man who believes that loyalty is a currency the world will always accept. The summer of 2002 declined the currency. Lazio's finances collapsed, and the sale of the captain became not a choice but an amputation.

The details deserve underlining. By his own account the players had gone eight months without pay; Nesta himself was owed roughly two million euro in back wages — and half of that debt he converted into Lazio shares, easing the pressure on the coffers of the very club that could no longer afford him. Find, in the whole cynical history of the transfer market, a gesture more quietly aristocratic than that. On 31 August 2002, the last day of the window, he was sold to Milan for a reported thirty-one million euro — sixty billion lire in the old money — comfortably the largest fee Milan paid that summer, and he left the team of his heart the way a man leaves a burning house: because he must, and looking backward.

Milan took him in without ceremony, the way a city takes possession of a tower it did not build: entirely, and at once. He would anchor the defence for a decade; and within a year of the wound came the redemption, the Champions League itself, won in his very first season in rossonero. In 2002 he was simply a great defender learning to be sad in a new city, and the city, to its lasting credit, set about giving him reasons to stop.

Free Transfers and One Great Cheque

Around Nesta the club assembled the rest at prices that hardly deserve the name. Clarence Seedorf came from Inter, of all houses, and came without a cheque at all: a straight exchange, Francesco Coco crossing the city in the other direction, the valuation recorded at around twenty-two and a half million euro though contemporaries quoted higher figures, as they generally do when a fee is barter rather than banknotes. He had been born in Paramaribo, in Suriname, and brought up in the new town of Almere, where he played for the amateurs of AS '80 and Real Almere until Ajax took him in 1987; he was sixteen years old when they gave him his debut, on 22 October 1992, in a 7-3 cup win at VVV-Venlo. Now he crossed a city instead of a sea, and stayed ten years and four hundred and thirty-two matches.

Rivaldo came free from Barcelona, which in any ordinary summer would have been the headline of headlines; Jon Dahl Tomasson came free from Feyenoord; Dario Simic followed Seedorf across from Inter for about five million; Samuele Dalla Bona arrived from Chelsea; and Umit Davala went with Coco to the other half of the city. It was not a spending spree so much as a composition: a free transfer here, a swap there, one great cheque written for the one irreplaceable man.

Pre-season gathered at Milanello in July with the squad thinned by the World Cup, several of the first team still on national duty or resting, and it wandered, as pre-seasons do, as far as Glasgow: on 28 July Milan drew 2-2 with Rangers at Ibrox, one of those friendlies that the record keeps and the memory discards. Yet anyone watching with the right sort of eyes could already make out the outline of the team — a midfield of thinkers, a defence of monuments, forwards who between them could pick any lock in Europe. It wanted only the autumn, and the autumn was coming.

Six Evenings, and the Road Back to Dortmund

The Champions League placed Milan in a first group stage with Deportivo La Coruña, Lens and Bayern Munich, and the story was told in six evenings under floodlights. Lens were beaten 2-1 at San Siro on 18 September; six days later Milan went to Deportivo and won 4-0, a scoreline that made the continent look up from its newspaper. Then, on the first evening of October, came the result that named the season: Bayern 1, Milan 2, both goals struck by Filippo Inzaghi, the second a header six minutes from the end — the pickpocket of the penalty area, who has never willingly scored an early goal when a late one would hurt the victim more.

Bayern were beaten again at San Siro on 23 October, 2-1; there were stumbles at Lens on 29 October, 2-1, and at home to Deportivo on 13 November, 1-2, with passage already arranged; and Milan advanced at the top of their group with twelve points from four wins. The second group stage, drawn with Real Madrid, Borussia Dortmund and Lokomotiv Moscow, gave the year a chance to answer its own spring. On 26 November at San Siro: Milan 1, Real Madrid 0, Shevchenko striking on forty minutes. On 11 December, in Dortmund of all cathedrals: 0-1, Inzaghi on forty-nine, victory on the very ground where eight months earlier Milan had conceded four without reply. Eight months, the same ground, the same floodlights, and this time one goal was enough.

Inzaghi was the engine of that autumn, and when the 2002-03 campaign was finally counted he would stand as Milan's leading scorer by a distance — the size of that harvest is reckoned in the chapter after this one. Numbers describe the harvest and never the method: the method was patience, larceny, and a standing grievance with every offside line in Europe.

Three Days in November

The league, meanwhile, was being eaten in generous mouthfuls. Modena were beaten 3-0 away on 14 September; Torino were dismantled 6-0 at San Siro on 6 October; Atalanta fell 4-1 on their own ground on 20 October. There was one true bruise — 10 November, Juventus 2, Milan 1, the old enemy reminding the new pretender who still held the deeds to the title — and there was one clean, necessary win over Roma, 1-0, on 7 December, the kind of result that wins nothing by itself and without which nothing is ever won.

Between the bruise and the Roma win came the derby, and the derby was the year in miniature. On 23 November, before 78,843 souls, Milan beat Inter 1-0 at San Siro. Three days later, at the same address, Real Madrid were beaten by the same score. Two one-nils in a single week, against the neighbour and against the grandest name in the European directory; and if you wish to know when the rest of the continent began to take Ancelotti's Milan seriously, you may set your watch by that week in November.

Milan entered the new year at the top of the table, and spring, it must be said at once, would be unkind to that particular ambition, and the scudetto went elsewhere; the final table and the exact distance of the shortfall are left to the accounting of the next chapter, which has better reasons to be cheerful. But to judge 2002 by the league alone is to measure a house by the height of its scaffolding. In twelve months Ancelotti had taken a convalescent squad to fourth place and back among the aristocracy; in one summer the club had gathered Nesta and Seedorf and Rivaldo and Tomasson; and by December the eleven had found one another — Maldini and Nesta behind, Pirlo and Gattuso and Seedorf and Rui Costa in the middle, Shevchenko and Inzaghi and Rivaldo ahead — the side that within a year would take the Champions League and the Coppa Italia both. Nesta had come on the last day of August still in mourning for another club. By the end of November the defence he had joined had kept Inter and Real Madrid to nothing at all, in the same week, at the same address, under the same lights.