It's not just a game. According to some vulgates it never is, and it certainly cannot be tomorrow. The Coppa Italia final between Lazio and Rome cannot be just a match, in any way: the stakes are too high, almost vital, too much tension. It's not just one game: it's at least four.
It's the way in which two disappointed teams (a different disappointment in form, but not in substance) can give an ultimate meaning to a season otherwise, like too many others, thrown to the wind. A way to engrave a vintage in history, inscribing one's name in a minor but no less eternal register.
Tomorrow's derby is the match through which all hope of glory for Rome and Lazio passes, in a season that has seen the teams from the Capital rise to the role of periphery of Italian football, the only possibility of lifting a trophy that has been missing for too many years.
It is the match (which is never just a match) through which one of the two teams takes part in a European competition: whoever wins goes to the Europa League, with all that this entails economically, whoever loses will spend their on the couch, chewing popcorn and regretting.
It is the match that can represent the starting point of a new season full of laurels. The winner of the Italian cup will face Italian champions Juventus next August, in the Italian super cup. A minor trophy, certainly, but which can give the decisive momentum to the future of Rome and Lazio, giving the project of one of the two Romans a different dignity.
It is the final through which city rule passes. Not a trophy, of course, but an inferior concept, linked to animality and the bell tower. This does not make it a less important concept: city supremacy is an atavistic, almost carnal necessity of the two parties involved. A supremacy that at the moment appears uncertain (Lazio won a derby to zero, but finished behind in the championship), and which is only waiting for a victory in the Italian cup final to point the needle of this abstruse balance in a clear direction.
And then Totti against Hernanes, Klose against Osvaldo, Petkovic against Andrazzoli, on the day of the mayoral elections, and then all the others. Hoping it's just a ball game.
