What if it was all a dream? The so-called Class of 2019. The summer visits to Vienna, Liege, and Kyiv. Failures in Almelo and Rotterdam, but an ultimate vengeance and triumph over 17 other Dutch clubs in the league and others in the Dutch Cup. Bayern, Real, and Juventus: scared off or fully defeated.
For a brief moment in history, Ajax were the best team in the world. But what if they weren’t? What if our memory simply isn’t capable of comprehending everything that unfolds before us?
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I sat pondering this concept of the validity of memory on a sunny day in Japan, a few weeks after Ajax’s disappointing loss to Tottenham Hotspur in the semi-finals of the Champions League. My girlfriend and I had fled the stuffy crowd in Kyoto’s Higashiyama district and found refuge for our aching feet on the concrete steps of a narrow alleyway. One could see the countless shingles atop the narrow roofs—a clear blue sky floating above—the wiry telephone poles stringing each structure to the next. But the clarity of the image has already begun to evade my mind’s reach. As I type this, fewer and fewer details remain.
