An hour or so after the fireworks had finished, long after the smoke had cleared and the lights had dimmed, a handful of Bayern Munich players returned to the field at the Stadium of Light in Lisbon. In near darkness, Serge Gnabry, Joshua Kimmich and David Alaba sat down on the turf. At last, the strangest season was over. Now was the time to rest and to reflect.

Or it should have been, at any rate. Yet even before Bayern collected the Champions League trophy, the new season was already underway. A peppering of domestic leagues had started across Europe. The early rounds of the next Champions League and Europa League were already being played. Other teams had long since returned to preseason training.

This feels like the weekend that the 2020-21 season starts: the opening of the new Premier League and La Liga campaigns, with Serie A and the Bundesliga scheduled to return in a few days’ time. The reality, though, is different: Soccer never really went away.

This is still, though, a watershed moment. The restarts of the continent’s major competitions in May and June felt, at the time, somehow novel, isolated events, make-do exceptions on the road back to normality.

Source: New York Times

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