We care so much about winning in football, and rightly so. To echo the words of Danny Blanchflower, “the game is about glory. It is about doing things in style and with a flourish, about going out and beating the other lot, not waiting for them to die of boredom”.

Blanchflower captained Tottenham Hotspur, the club I support, during its most successful years. His iconic quote has been sewn into the fabric of the club, and is still easily recognisable to Spurs fans today.

Indeed, trophies are what every club and player aspires to get their hands on. They are in themselves a symbol of glory, the deserved prize for being the best, for ‘going out and beating the other lot’.

Even in a somewhat underwhelming final, Liverpool showed the same resolve and clinical instinct which saw them dwarf some of Europe’s finest teams throughout this season. They deserved to win club football’s most prestigious prize. As bitter a pill it is for me to swallow, it remains true nonetheless.

But what if that wasn’t the case? What if in the final Spurs turned possession into chances and chances into goals? What if Sissoko kept his arm down? What if I wore my lucky shirt to White Hart Lane? What if we won the Champions League?

That night would have been the best of my life. A win in the biggest game in Spurs’ history, reaching the pinnacle of club football, parading Tottenham High Road into the early hours of the morning, getting through cans of cheap lager and hugging strangers. All of this with the person i’ve shared almost all of my football memories with: my dad.

And it’s this which leads me to consider: if I had gone to the stadium by myself that night, would I have felt the same sort of joy in winning?

Probably not.

As much as football is about glory, what I believe makes it ‘the beautiful game’ is its humanity. Football has always been, and I hope always will be the people’s sport. Its greatness is upheld by the people who make it happen: the fans, the players, the coaches.

I will always remember Lucas Moura’s winning goal in Amsterdam, the moment we earned our place in the final. I will remember it not purely because of its significance for Tottenham Hotspur, but also and perhaps mostly because of the friends I was with in the pub that night, the pint I chucked over some nearby Arsenal fans, and the phone call I made to my dad immediately after the final whistle blew.

As the story goes for most other football fans, it was my dad who got me into the game: taking me to matches as a kid, playing with me at the park on cold Saturday afternoons, educating me on which clubs I must unconditionally hate for the rest of my life.

And after the game on Saturday, the anti-climactic, heartbreaking game, I found myself on the train home laughing at stories my dad was telling me of away days gone by. Old friends, early starts, coach journeys, cup finals, wins, losses. And regardless of the result of each game, it was the memory of the occasion and the people he spent them with which stuck the most.

Caught up in that moment, it didn’t feel very much like our beloved team had just blown its best ever chance of lifting that iconic European Cup. Rather, it felt like any other trip to White Hart Lane with my old man. Is that normal? I didn’t think it was.

Being a supporter has its good and bad times. One week you can feel euphoria, the next despair. Now there are bad times, and then there are bottling the Champions League final bad times. So for me on Saturday it should have been despair, and truth be told it was for a lot of the game. The first minute penalty, the wasted chances, Origi’s fatal strike. The match itself was just poor overall, and yet I was able to put it behind me quite quickly. A day on and I’m surprisingly upbeat. How can I put my finger on it?

Well, I actually think it’s easy. During this campaign I’ve made some really great memories with a load of people, some of whom are close to me, others who i’ll probably never meet again.

It may be easy to forget that Spurs were so close to exiting the competition in the group stage. I remember embracing two random Spurs fans in a Manchester pub when we narrowly secured qualification to the last 16. At the time we all probably thought that would be the best we’d get that year. It wasn’t. And those two blokes were not the last Spurs fans I celebrated with.

When the time comes I will retell the story of how we choked against the Scousers in 2019 to my children, who will of course be converted into long-suffering Spurs fans like their dad. They may be bored to death with my memories of the last-minute winners, the legendary opposition players we faced, the manager who broke down in tears. Ultimately, however, it will be the folks I shared the journey with this year who I will remember most fondly.

In summary, thinking this piece through and subsequently writing it has taught me something I think is rather valuable, which is that our appreciation of football comes not necessarily from what we experience, but with whom we experience it.