When you hear the name Gareth Bale, you think not just of the luscious goals, but of the reactions those goals elicited. At the moment his outrageous bicycle kick arced past a helpless Loris Karius in Kyiv, Zinedine Zidane, until then exalted as scorer of the finest ever goal in a Champions League final, flapped a hand manically, as if he had just singed it in a fire. Even a manager who never fully trusted him had to acknowledge that Bale, on his night, was molten.
The same incredulity greeted his solo masterpiece to win the 2014 Copa del Rey. Bale plotted such a scenic route around Marc Bartra that he was almost out of the camera frame, like a man who had slipped down the tunnel for some evening shopping. But in a flash he was away and gone, conjuring the goal to win a clásico with a speed and technical brilliance that left his team-mates agape. Even an injured Cristiano Ronaldo, on the touchline in a suit and a baseball cap, looked mesmerised, struggling to compute what he had seen.
Bale's two defining flourishes in the all white of Real Madrid took place four years apart. And yet in any retrospective of his career, on which he has called time aged 33, they are all that matter. Time will erase the pettier subplots of his stay in Spain, ranging from his grappling with the language to his weakness for goading Madridistas with his love of golf.
What will be left are the pyrotechnics, the moments of unfeasible mastery that make him, by a distance, British football's finest export.
While Bale and Spanish culture could combine like oil and water at times, his body of work brooks no argument. As he slips off into retirement, ready to hit six-irons to his heart's content, it is on the back of five Champions League triumphs, three La Liga titles, three Club World Cups, plus an MLS Cup in his final club game as a professional. In total, the Wales captain amassed 18 trophies. Harry Kane, his English equivalent, has yet to win one.
This is no mere quirk of fate. Gallingly for Kane, Bale can even claim to be the more decorated Tottenham player, having belonged to the League Cup-winning side of 2009. But for all that he was loved in north London – where, with one star turn against Inter Milan, he ruined Maicon's career just as decisively as he would end Bartra's – he ensured a far more lasting lustre in Madrid.
Such a verdict might appear counter-intuitive. Bale languished for longer than he flourished at the Bernabéu, his relationship with Zidane so toxic that they were not even on speaking terms by the end, his pariah status reinforced by the sight of him peering out through mock binoculars from his seat in an empty stand. But these failures in communication were offset by his emphatic delivery on the grandest stage.
While Bale was never quite the foil for Ronaldo in the way that club president Florentino Pérez envisaged, he had a pivotal role in a sequence of four Champions League glories in five years. In the 2014 final, a tense brawl with city rivals Atlético in Lisbon, it was his extra-time header that laid the platform.
Bale, often eclipsed by the flashlight of Ronaldo's fame, did not receive the local gratitude that was his due. It is an incidental detail in the context of his feats. Several of Britain's finest, from Laurie Cunningham to Steve McManaman, David Beckham to Michael Owen, had plied the path to Madrid and found it a tempestuous experience. Jonathan Woodgate, infamously, was so overwhelmed on his debut that he was sent off and scored an own goal, en route to being voted by Marca as Real's worst signing of the 21st century.
Bale has resisted the mercenary final act unlike Ronaldo
Not even Bale's fiercest detractors could depict him so vitriolically. He is, after all, a key pillar of one of Real's most garlanded eras. No wonder he held up all five fingers of his right hand in the wake of last season's victory in Paris, even though he had played just seven minutes of the campaign. It was a moment worthy of a lavish toast, with a fifth European Cup elevating him above Liverpool's Phil Neal as the most successful British player in the history of the competition.
You can claim that Bale was carried to that coronation on the shoulders of others. But a key component of the modern footballer's arsenal is understanding when to stick and when to twist. Where Kane has found himself marooned at a silverware-starved club, Bale left Tottenham at just the right time in 2013, staying at Real long enough to cement his standing as a vital contributor to its greatest period since the 1950s.
That is quite the distinction for the once spindly-legged Southampton winger who, fresh out of Whitchurch High School, made his Premier League bow at 16.
For all the precocity of those beginnings, Bale has also grasped the art of the ending. Where Ronaldo debases himself with a soulless epilogue in Saudi Arabia with Al Nassr, Bale has resisted the mercenary final act, scripting his farewell on his terms.
Sometimes, he gave the impression of being too calculated with that heart-shaped goal celebration, even of having too laconic an attitude to his own talent. But he is, by his own admission, retiring fulfilled.
And that, in a profession saturated with damaged souls, is a priceless gift.