The 43rd European Cup was the sixth under the Champions League name, and UEFA kept tinkering. For the first time the competition expanded to six groups instead of four, forcing the runners-up of eight domestic leagues into the draw and bringing back the champions of smaller nations who had been pushed into the UEFA Cup for three years. Germany became the first association to send three teams, because Borussia Dortmund held the trophy but finished only third in the Bundesliga. Armenia, Azerbaijan, Slovakia, and the Republic of Macedonia entered their champions for the first time. Yugoslavia returned after the lifting of UN sanctions that had kept them out since 1991-92. Football was reopening to its full continent.

Real Madrid had won the European Cup six times by 1966, more than anyone, and the trophy was woven into the club's mythology. Then it stopped. Generations of fixtures passed - Cruyff at Ajax, Liverpool's English run, Milan's Sacchi years - while Madrid won La Liga and lost in Europe. By 1998 the drought had hardened into something the club's older fans no longer expected to see end. The squad assembled by coach Jupp Heynckes mixed Spanish core with global imports - Roberto Carlos and Raúl, Davor Šuker, Clarence Seedorf, Fernando Hierro. They had finished fourth in La Liga that season. Almost no one picked them as favorites to lift the trophy.

The defending champions Borussia Dortmund came into the semi-finals carrying the prestige of the previous year's title. Madrid eliminated them. Heynckes' team had survived a group containing Bayer Leverkusen and squeezed through quarter-final ties on the kind of narrow margins that look like luck until you win the trophy. The other semifinal saw Juventus dispatch Monaco. The Italians had reached three straight finals - winning the first in 1996 against Ajax, losing the second to Dortmund in 1997 - and arrived in Amsterdam expecting to put right what had gone wrong twelve months earlier.

The final at Amsterdam Arena was tense and tactical, not the open showcase UEFA had hoped for. Madrid's central midfielder Clarence Seedorf later remembered the silence in the locker room at halftime - both teams scoreless, both convinced one mistake would decide it. The mistake came in the 66th minute. Roberto Carlos chased a long ball down the left, beat his marker, and slipped it across to Mijatović. The Montenegrin had been signed from Valencia the year before for a then-modest fee, arriving as a key attacking addition. He took one touch to control, looked up, and pushed it past Peruzzi from close range. Replays would show Mijatović a fraction offside, depending on how you read the lines. The goal stood. Juventus pressed. The clock ran out.

The Seventh, as Madrid fans call it, started a run that defines modern European football. Real won again in 2000, again in 2002, and the club's institutional confidence - the assumption that the Champions League is somehow theirs to lose - dates from this night in Amsterdam. Juventus would not reach another final for nearly two decades. Mijatović scored only a handful more goals for Madrid before injuries pushed him into the wider game's memory as the man who delivered La Séptima. Košice of Slovakia, debutants in the group stage, had lost all six matches and finished pointless - the first team to do so. Sometimes a season makes history at the top of the table. Sometimes it makes history at the bottom too.