It's strange to see them like this, child prodigies aged, but still prodigious. Totti and Buffon. Buffon and Totti. With their aura of eternal youth – the infinite childhood of champions – scratched, but always inexhaustible, like the richest seam of a mine, even after twenty years of excavations at the highest levels.
It's strange because both of them (Totti and Buffon, Buffon and Totti) started doing what they do best at a very early age, namely scoring and saving. Already at 16, 17 years old, on the pitches of Serie A. And maybe we didn't think they could get old too, and having never lost sight of them even for a moment, we never noticed. Only, sometimes it happens to see them kids, with very smooth skin or pimples, doing what they do best, and only then do we realize.
They'll face each other for the billionth time on Sunday night, trying to do it once more, to push the night further. For both it will be the 689th game of their careers, excluding national teams. The footballer of all and that of a few, the national champion and that of a single city, which venerates him. Last time it was Totti who rejoiced (scoring for his friend for the tenth time), with a remote-controlled full neck bolt under the crossbar of the goal defended by Buffon. Unstoppable, they say in these cases.
It was a pleonastic victory, however, the one-night party destined to remain so. History, after the momentary detour along the trajectory of the Giallorossi ten bomb, has resumed its natural course: Juventus has resumed the path to the Scudetto, Roma the bumpy path of a wasted season.
This time it's different. This time, as never before between Totti and Buffon, the most important stakes are up for grabs, Roma's unthinkable (and perhaps impossible) run-up to Juventus, launched towards another championship as dominatrix and towards the third scudetto of line.
An uncertain challenge, one might say for a triple, between two teams who, as their captains have always done, can finally look each other in the eye. The only sure thing, however it will end, is the embrace between the two at the beginning of the game, when they exchange pennants and shake hands, and then at the final whistle, when the games are over. Those like them – the child prodigies – do this: they fight with all the strength they have against each other and then they hug each other. Because they are brothers, natural children of the goddess Eupalla.
