Maybe, some decades ago, a small boy might have been intrigued by a major European final taking place just a couple of hours from his house, bringing to his secluded part of the world one of its greatest club sides. And Real Madrid, too.
If so, then what Jimmy Thelin would have watched then he has, in one small way, emulated now. The last time any Aberdeen squad went on a run of 10 successive match wins, one was the biggest of them all that wet Swedish evening.
Clearly there is no equivalence between the magnitude of the fixtures Thelin is winning now and those Alex Ferguson did then, but what is happening at Pittodrie in 2024 is not standard.
That the story of a manager’s first weeks in charge should even contain references to such iconic earlier chapters is extraordinary. For most to go before Thelin, any comparisons invited after 10 games were infinitely less flattering; some, indeed, didn’t even make it that far.
The tale includes improbable redemption arcs for Pape Gueye, Vicente Besuijen and Shayden Morris, working the oracle for the second match running as a late circumnavigator of wearying full-backs.
There’s also some heavy foreshadowing of the unlikely space invasion which will become familiar in opposition boxes – the first target of both of Morris’ pull-backs being the lung-bursting Nicky Devlin, subverting the Scottish wisdom of keeping it tight and not leaving the back door unattended.
Little Jimmy, of course, probably wasn’t invested in the nearby battles waged by Aberdeen’s footballers while he was staging his own with Action Man.
But if he was not as intimately aware of what had gone before in and around Aberdeen as the favoured candidates of some others, then, on the mounting evidence to date, that was absolutely a good thing.
Conversation