It's less than a decade since Juventus was hobbled and left for dead by Italian soccer.
The club they call the Old Lady had been the fulcrum of a vast match-fixing racket. The conspiracy was so huge, they gave it the most generic name possible – Calciopoli (roughly "Football Scandal").
This was 2006 – a strange moment in the Italian game. The national team was in the midst of winning its fourth World Cup, while Italy's professional league was sliding into total disarray.
Stadiums were empty and decrepit; hooligan firms had taken over in many spots; the biggest clubs were conspiring among themselves to maintain their position on top; the lesser ones were going bankrupt.
Italians had long been considered the sport's puritans. With their grim and methodical approach, they are the Jesuits of soccer. Now they'd become an international punchline. It was beginning to seem like every single one of them was a crook.
In keeping with that theme, no one was really punished for Calciopoli. The key figure – former Juventus executive Luciano Moggi – was eventually acquitted in court, in part because the statute of limitations had passed.
The only one who got it right on the chin was Juventus itself. The team was relegated to the second division and docked 30 points – making a one-year recovery virtually impossible. That penalty was reduced to nine points on appeal. This thing has been nothing but appeals stretching on into forever.
It says something about the allure of the club that it managed to retain many of its best players – notably, goalkeeper Gianluigi Buffon. They clawed their way back up to the top by 2007.
But for several years after that, Juventus – and Italian soccer in general – stopped mattering.
In the late 1980s, Serie A stood peerless on top of world soccer. AC Milan fielded the first international super-team. It was a squad so rammed with talent that, owing to domestic player restrictions, some of the world's best routinely rode the Milan bench.
Fifteen years on, you'd get a consensus that Italy had taken a step back. It was now just one of the world's best leagues, along with the English Premier League and Spain's La Liga.
These days, no one would include Serie A in that company. There are still teams and players of enormous quality, but the league itself is simply too troubled.
Emblematic of that is the presence of former Juventus player Sebastien Giovinco in Toronto. He came to Major League Soccer for the money, which is a pretty good reason to do anything. Twenty years ago, it wouldn't have happened. Not for any amount. But Italy has become the sort of place Italians want to leave.
It's never quite clear if a club – even some of the biggest – is going to survive from season to season. Italian soccer is racked by structural problems – primarily that teams do not own their stadiums, and so are not incentivized to keep them from crumbling to the ground. People still love their soccer, but they don't go to games. In many spots, the arenas have been turned over to kooks in balaclavas.
If you're a fan of the game, you probably have a strong reaction to the idea of the Italian brand of soccer. If you're not Italian, it's negative.
Despite producing some of the most technically gifted players in history – Juve's ageless midfielder Andrea Pirlo is near the top of that list – Italians would prefer to dull you to death. All of their ambition is based on calculated risk-taking, rather than any sort of joy.
Soccer needs that. It requires realism, and a place for that idea to live. If Italy goes, a whole philosophic school inside the game goes with it. Along with England and Brazil, no single country matters so much to the iconography of the world's most popular sport.
On Wednesday, Juventus suggested that the decade in the wilderness is ending. It has now won four consecutive Serie A championships. It is in the final of the Coppa Italia. But Italian trophies don't mean as much any more. To really matter, you have to win Europe.
(Inter won the continental title in 2010, but with a team so lacking in invention or aspiration, we've all decided to forget it happened.)
Nowadays, we want constant fireworks. So everyone had agreed on the Champions League final they wanted to see – Barcelona against Real Madrid. It would have been the first time the bitterest rivals in world sport had played each other for a European championship.
For all our sakes, Juventus ruined that. They stifled the defending title-holders over two games, winning 3-2 on aggregate. The key goals were provided by Alvaro Morata – a 22-year-old Spaniard who was once the property of Real Madrid. Real dumped him by the side of the road, where Juve picked him up. There is in all this a sense of destiny.
Can they get by Barcelona at Berlin's Olympic Stadium? Probably not. But it's difficult to imagine anyone having a better shot at it.
Barcelona is an irresistible force. Its forward trio – Lionel Messi, Luis Suarez and Neymar – might be the best that've ever played. They certainly look like it right now.
Real – or Bayern Munich or Paris Saint-Germain or Chelsea or whomever else – are slightly more resistible forces. There is nothing to suggest they can out-Barca Barca, which is what they'd have to do.
Juve, on the other hand, are practitioners of footballing judo. They turn your force back on you. They are compact and physical and just plain old. They have the cunning of the elderly.
Most important, they're incredibly Italian. Maybe not by birth, but certainly by temperament. They don't frighten.
Should Juventus win on June 6, it signals a return for Italian soccer. We're pulling for that. It's been so long since we had a chance to complain about the way they play, we'd begun to wonder how we managed without them.
Follow me on Twitter: @cathalkelly
Cathal Kelly