Eighteen minutes into the 2006 Champions League final, Jens Lehmann came off his line at the Stade de France, missed the ball, and brought down Samuel Eto'o with the outside chance of goal wide open in front of him. Terje Hauge, the Norwegian referee, had no decision to make and knew it. Red card. Arsenal, twenty minutes into the biggest night in their history, were down to ten men and down a goalkeeper, with Manuel Almunia stripped and sent on cold to face Ronaldinho, Eto'o and Deco.

What happened next is the part everybody remembers correctly, for once. Arsenal did not collapse. They defended the flank, absorbed the spare man, and went in at half-time a goal up — the first-half scoreline reads Barcelona 0, Arsenal 1 — through Sol Campbell, who met a cross with a header so clean it barely needed the goalkeeper to move the wrong way. "THE TEN MEN OF ARSENAL LEAD THE CHAMPIONS LEAGUE FINAL," as the commentary had it at the time, which is one of those lines that sounds like a legend being built in real time because it was.

The second half is where memory and record start to pull apart. Arsenal held out for the best part of an hour with ten men against the best attacking side in Europe, and the story that gets told afterwards is almost entirely about the sending-off — as though Arsenal lost a match they were winning purely because of Hauge's whistle. The record says something more specific. Thierry Henry had already missed from six yards with the game goalless. Later, with Arsenal still leading, Alexander Hleb sliced him clean through the Barcelona defence, Rafael Márquez closing but not covering, a clear route to goal — and Henry's finish, in the words of one account written twenty years afterwards, "lacked the usual conviction and disguise." Eto'o equalised. Henrik Larsson came off the bench with fresh legs Wenger's side no longer had, and set up Juliano Belletti for the winner. Barcelona 2, Arsenal 1. Larsson, asked about the sending-off two decades on, said it plainly: "If we had VAR back then, we would have been waiting half an hour." He isn't wrong, and it still wouldn't have changed the finish that mattered.

There is a proper case for saying none of this tells you anything about Arsenal as a club, only about one bad piece of luck on one May night. Wenger's side arrived in Paris having conceded twice in twelve Champions League matches that season, against Juventus, Real Madrid and Ajax among them — the last team to score past them had done so ten matches and eight months earlier. That is not a soft, individualist team papering over a shaky spine. That is one of the meanest defensive units English football sent to Europe in a generation, built by a manager who spent that whole era being accused of the opposite sin. On that reading, Lehmann's red card is simply the variable that decided the match, and asking what it says about Arsenal's identity is asking the wrong question of the wrong data point.

The trouble with that defence is that it explains the eighty-five minutes and skips the six seconds that actually decided the trophy. A defence that concedes twice in twelve games gets you to a final with ten men still leading it in the sixty-fifth minute. It does not, on its own, put the ball in the net at the other end when the chance finally comes. That job fell to the best striker in the world at the time, clean through, one man to beat, and he didn't take it — not through nerve exactly, but through something harder to coach, the split-second where the individual brilliance that got you there is supposed to finish the job and simply doesn't arrive. Arsenal became, that night, the first English club and only the third side anywhere to have finished runner-up in all three of Europe's major competitions. A full set of near-misses is not bad luck repeated. It is a pattern asking to be read.

Twenty years is a long time to wait to test that pattern again, and Arsenal did it this May, in a Champions League final against Paris Saint-Germain that ended, by all the coverage sitting alongside it, in the brutal reality of penalties rather than in the manner of 2006 — a different mechanism of loss, the same conclusion. Mikel Arteta got them back to the one match Wenger's side never got a second crack at, twenty years and one week short of the anniversary, and the club still walked away from Europe's biggest night without the trophy. Arsenal, in other words, are two-for-two on getting there and one-for-two on the specific ways of not winning it, which is either a coincidence spanning two decades or it isn't.

What makes the timing sharper is who is doing the individual shining while the collective question sits unresolved. Bukayo Saka has just scored a hat-trick on a World Cup stage, the kind of week that gets a player's face on every back page regardless of club shirt, and Arsenal's own history says that kind of brilliance and a major trophy have shared a pitch before without deciding to cooperate. Henry was the best forward alive in May 2006 and still missed the chance that would have made the whole night simple. Nobody doubted his talent afterwards. They doubted, correctly, whether talent alone was ever going to be the thing that closed it out — and that is the question Arsenal are still answering, one near-miss at a time, twenty years and one penalty shootout apart.