The kick-off at the Stade de France on Wednesday 17 May 2006 was at a quarter to eight, and eighteen minutes later Jens Lehmann was walking off it, sent for an early bath by the Norwegian referee Terje Hauge after bringing down Samuel Eto'o with the last man beaten. Ludovic Giuly tapped the resulting chance into an empty net and the flag went up, correctly, for offside — the goal that never was, the one nobody under thirty quite believes happened because it doesn't appear in any scoreline. What does appear, in the thirty-seventh minute, with Arsenal already down to ten men, is Sol Campbell's header, unsaveable, right into the corner, and it put Arsenal ahead in a Champions League final for the only time in the club's history. Attendance, 79,610. Arsenal's first European final of any kind since Copenhagen in 1994, and their first ever at this level.

What the memory does with that evening is compress it. Ask most Gooners over forty what they remember and they will tell you about backs to the wall, men behind the ball, the ten heroes of Paris hanging on for grim life. The record complicates it. Arsenal led from the thirty-seventh minute to the seventy-sixth — thirty-nine minutes with ten men, much of it comfortable, Almunia required but not besieged, Kolo Touré and Campbell doing what they'd been doing all season. The siege, when it came, lasted four minutes: Eto'o's equaliser and Juliano Belletti's winner, seventy-six and eighty. Arsenal did not survive an hour under the cosh and then fall. They led for the best part of the match and lost it very late, which is a sadder story, because it means the game was there to be won outright, not merely defended.

It was there to be won because Thierry Henry had two chances that night that better strikers, or the same striker on a different evening, put away without noise. Six yards out in the first half, before the sending-off, he shot straight at Victor Valdes. Later, after Alexander Hleb had sliced the Barcelona defence open and sent him through with only Rafa Marquez giving chase, Henry — the finisher of finishers, the man whose whole reputation rested on composure in exactly that square yard of pitch — scuffed it. The word the match report uses is that the finish "lacked the usual conviction." Thirteen months later he was in a Barcelona shirt.

That is the part the anniversary pieces tend to skip past, because it complicates the sentiment: the man Arsenal most needed to win that final signed, within little more than a year, for the club that beat them in it. His departure in the summer of 2007 did not just remove a top scorer. It removed the point around which four seasons of Wenger's attacking football had organised itself, and Arsenal spent a long stretch of the following years discovering that goals and captaincy and gravity do not automatically relocate to whoever is handed the shirt number next.

The case against drawing a straight line from that to now is a fair one, and worth stating plainly before it's answered. Arsenal in 2007 were a selling club dressed as a buying one, mid-stadium-debt, competing against a market that hadn't yet been reshaped by Gulf and American ownership money. Arsenal in 2026 have a data department the size of a small newsroom, a recruitment structure that has landed Declan Rice and Martin Ødegaard without visible panic, and a manager who this spring took the club back to a Champions League final for the first time since Paris — against Paris Saint-Germain, as it happens, not quite twenty years to the day but close enough that anyone keeping the scrapbook noticed. The tools available now are not the tools available then. On resources alone, the comparison to 2007 looks like nostalgia wearing an argument's clothes.

And Leandro Trossard is not Thierry Henry. Henry left as the club's record scorer and captain, at the exact moment Arsenal needed him most. Trossard leaves as a squad forward who scored important goals from the bench and never started a season as first choice. The scale is not remotely the same, and it would insult both players to pretend otherwise.

What survives the comparison is the shape of the response. Arsenal's habit, going back at least to 2007, has been to treat a departure as a wound requiring mourning rather than a vacancy requiring a signing — to spend a window or two auditioning heirs instead of simply buying the next thing that's needed, whatever shape it comes in. Henrik Larsson, sixty seconds off the bench that night in Paris, joked to The Athletic twenty years on that VAR would have kept everyone waiting half an hour for that Lehmann decision. Arsenal have sometimes waited considerably longer than that to decide what a departure actually requires of them.

What a club chooses to make a story out of tells you what it currently needs to believe. In 2007 the story Arsenal told itself was that Henry's shoes were too big to fill quickly, which was true, and became an excuse for filling them slowly. The Trossard-sized version of that story is much smaller, but the instinct — wait, mourn, hope the market solves it — is the same instinct wearing a squad number instead of the number 14. Paris in 2006 didn't teach Arsenal how to lose a final. It taught them, badly, how to lose a player. Twenty years and one more final later, the lesson is still being marked.