Can a dramatic climax be anticlimactic? It’s a question that lingers in the aftermath of Lionel Messi’s début appearance for Inter Miami C.F., on Friday night, at DRV PNK Stadium in Fort Lauderdale. The game was decided, in the ninety-fourth minute, with a classic piece of Messi sorcery: a free kick, from about twenty-five yards out, that levitated past the reach of goalkeeper Andrés Gudiño to secure a 2–1 victory over the Mexican club Cruz Azul. It was strange to see the thirty-six-year-old legend in the colors of his new club—a uniform whose hue appears to have been sourced at an Everglades flamingo colony—but the spectacle of Messi delivering a wizardly dead-ball strike is one of the most familiar in sports. Yet those feats of Messi magic have so often come in high-stakes games, in teeming stadiums, against the best competition in the world.
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