There's nothing like the Champions League for reminding you that the race is not always to the swift nor the battle to the strong, but that's the way to bet.

On Saturday night the San Siro hosted a final that proved that some guys get all the luck, and they are usually the same guys who have all the money and power. Atlético Madrid had beaten the best teams in the world on the road to Milan, they gave blood, sweat, tears and toil, and in the end it turned out that all they were doing was setting the stage for another Cristiano Ronaldo muscle show.

Until the moment that Juanfran’s penalty struck the base of the post, Ronaldo had endured a personal nightmare, made more agonising by his acute awareness that this final, like every final, was all about him.

Ronaldo was himself the first spectator at the drama of Ronaldo, stealing little glances up at the stadium’s big screen to see himself after almost every action. He is so compulsively mesmerised by the spectacle of himself that you sometimes wonder how he can also concentrate on the game.

But the first two hours of the 2016 final had not been the kind of movie you could imagine Ronaldo would like. You suspect he prefers the straightforward sort of superhero story where the hero defeats evil while flexing his gigantic muscles, and basks in the gratitude of mankind. This was more of a brooding revisionist take on the genre, where the hero is mysteriously stripped of his superpowers and forced to confront the limitations of his being.

Zinedine Zidane would claim afterwards that Ronaldo had been fully fit. For most of the match, Ronaldo had been doing his best to suggest that the Spanish journalists who insisted he hadn't been properly fit for at least a month were closer to the truth. Every time play stopped he was leaning forward with his hands on his knees, wincing and ostentatiously displaying his pain and exhaustion.

Stepover

What hurt more than the thigh injury he's been carrying was the knowledge that he had missed all his chances. He could have finished Atlético off in the 76th minute, but his stepover and shot failed to deceive Jan Oblak. Atlético promptly ran down the other end and scored.

Soon after that, Marcelo flashed over a cross from the left but Ronaldo couldn’t reach it. In extra time, he isolated Juanfran on the left wing but was dispossessed easily. He miscontrolled a ball that went out of play to delighted jeers from the Atléti supporters, and vented his anger with a crude revenge foul on Gabi.

He had one last chance at the end of extra time, when Real won a free kick 30 yards out. Ronaldo hitched his shorts up to his groin, the better to display his formidable thighs, but he blasted the shot into the middle of the wall.

As the final whistle went he would have known he had just played one of his worst matches for Real. The superhero had gone missing. The judgment would be harsh. Nobody would remember that he was injured. The verdict had already been pronounced.

Then Juanfran’s shot hit the post.

And that’s when everyone understood how the story was going to end. Ronaldo had chosen the fifth penalty again. He had done it in the semi-final of Euro 2012, and Spain had won the shootout against Portugal before Ronaldo even got to take his kick, and he had stared into the sky and shaken his head, and he had learned nothing and done it again, and this time it was going to work out.

The victorious side in a penalty shootout usually starts celebrating only when the winning penalty hits the net. For the last kicker, the long walk to the box is a trial. As Ronaldo strode forward, we knew we were already watching the coronation.

You suspected this was the way he would have written it himself. All eyes on him alone. He would score and he would win the cup for Real Madrid. Nothing in the history of football has ever been more certain.

He placed the ball, took a couple of steps back, flared out the muscles of his back as he surveyed Oblak in the goal, then ran forward and buried the ball in the back of the net. Off came the shirt, for the second time in a final. This is what you all came to see.

Suffering

So Ronaldo’s defining Champions League moment had come at the end of one of his worst performances. You wondered if the personal liberation he felt on scoring that kick and delivering the title was even more joyful because of the struggle and suffering that had gone before.

In fact, it sounded as though his internal mythmaking process had already cranked into gear, smoothing the events of the night into a glossier, less complicated story. “I had a vision,” he told Spanish TV. “I knew that I would score the winning goal. I told Zizou that and to let me take the fifth and that’s how it turned out. My third Champions League.”

He hadn’t really scored the winning goal, but that’s not how it will seem in a few years, when the details have faded from memory. Ronaldo has been at the top long enough to know that in finals, it’s all about how it ends. The rest is editing.