Roma did not lose to the referee: they collapsed under the weight of their past

In the end, Roma didn’t make it. After an endless final, perhaps the longest in the history of European cups, Mourinho’s team saw themselves defeated on penalties by the excellent Sevilla. At the final triple whistle which delegated the choice of the winner of the trophy to the fate of penalties, the fans around me in the stands looked into each other’s eyes. “It’s time to change the course of history”, I hear next to me. Serious, tired faces full of tension, enveloped in general silence and so distant from the good-natured wishes of “have fun” received on our departure from Rome. The reference to the historic change is to the final lost against Liverpool, back in 1984, always on penalties. Forty years and not hearing them, that defeat meant so much for an entire city, an event that is part of the sentimental education that every Roma fan receives. So even the 20-year-olds in attendance on Wednesday felt they were part of a moment where history could be vindicated. Instead, Roma lose the cup not due to the superiority of the opponent, not even due to poor refereeing and perhaps subject to personal grudges, they don’t lose even due to bad luck that can determine the outcome of a match. Rome collapses under the weight of its past made cumbersome by a visceral passion, all-encompassing, romantic, sometimes rude, illogical, an antidote to the evils that the city expresses and incomprehensible when perceived from the outside. A cumbersome past that doesn’t seem to leave room for future projects, as well as the dream of freeing itself from the ghosts that continue to inhabit it. There is a lack of a maturity process that would have a high cost, that of anesthetizing the passion of which one is the object and diluting it beyond one’s own people (see Juventus) to be free to adopt the Mahler motto – Tradition is the custody of fire. Non-worship of ashes – in a promulgative sense for the future.