Ignore those optimistic murmurings emanating from the Spanish capital; La Liga’s title race is indeed over. Barcelona, having beaten Atlético Madrid twice and owning a superior head-to-head goal differential over Real Madrid, are effectively seven and eight points up, respectively, on their rivals for the Primera crown with just seven matches left to play. Media types with a propensity for wishing imagined intrigue into existence can arch their eyebrows as sharply as they like following Barça’s Clásico defeat, but it won’t change the fact that the Blaugrana are uncatchable at this late stage of the season, as talented as they are and with as easy a schedule as they have remaining. A change at the top of the table would involve them stumbling several times against the likes of Sporting, Granada or a thoroughly discombobulated Valencia squad. Stranger things have happened in soccer, but all of them involved Eric Cantona.

Europe is where Barcelona have genuine work left to do, albeit against domestic competition. Tuesday marks the first leg of their Champions League quarterfinal tie against Atlético, who might not be the strongest opponent left in the tournament but are probably the trickiest for Barça... who have won each of their past six matches against Atleti. There’s logic to this. It’s labyrinthine.

In the way a hurricane is responsible for the new house that’s built to replace the wind-ravaged one, the 2013-14 iteration of Atlético Madrid—who knocked Barcelona out of the Champions League in April and won La Liga at the Nou Camp in May—are responsible for present-day Barça. Two years ago, Barcelona were scuffling through a relative ebb. They had hired Tata Martino to replace Pep Guardiola and were playing some bleary mish-mash of tiki-taka and a more muscular, Argentine style that didn’t suit their personnel. Xavi had lost the ability to play a pass the very moment it occurred to him, Neymar was finding his footing at a new club, and the team as a whole were prone to aimlessness against tightly packed defenses, sleepily knocking the ball back and forth without much purpose. After years of filtering through opponents as simply as a beam of light, Barcelona had finally become, at times, as daintily boring as their detractors had always accused them of being.

You wouldn’t know it from the scorelines—or even the results: five draws, one Barça loss—but Atleti ate them alive that season. In the Champions League quarterfinal especially, Barcelona hardly fashioned a dent in the bank of red and white stripes Diego Simeone put behind the ball. In that tie, Barça dominated possession and little else, with the overwhelming bulk of their attacks concluding in frustrated, wayward passes or with a heroic Messi getting smothered by three defenders. Then Atleti would thunder forward, Koke playing a sharp, searching pass and suddenly it was three Atleti players running at whatever remnants of the Barça defence had stayed near the halfway line. The second leg of the quarterfinal could have easily finished finished 3-0 to the capital club. (The posts at the Calderón rung out loudly and frequently in the opening fifteen minutes.) Instead, it was a single-goal Atleti victory that looked like a blowout.

The following summer, Luis Enrique replaced Martino. Club brass got the best striker money could buy in Luis Suárez and a skilled, industrious midfielder in Ivan Rakitić. And what has emerged, after about six months of the team assimilating Suárez and adjusting to Enrique’s tactics, is the most devastating attacking force in the world, one that can break down even Atlético Madrid, who have conceded two goals or more in four of the six matches they’ve played against Enrique’s Barça.

With that established, here’s something that sounds like baseless provocation but is at least a little bit true: the incandescence of Barcelona’s front line obscures a team that—Sergio Busquets aside, always Sergio Busquets aside—is ordinary, as twenty-storey colossi that drink the spinal fluid of holding midfielders go. Anyone who has kept up with Barça’s Liga grind can tell you that a sizable handful of Spanish teams have hung with them right up until some point in the second half when their trident of forwards slapped three goals on the scoreboard in fifteen minutes. Rakitić is wonderfully inventive, but he’s no Xavi. In his post-prime, Iniesta is capable of erasing a back line with a chipped pass, but he’s a bit less dependable game-to-game than he used to be. Mascherano isn’t a natural center back and leans too heavily on his ability to make last-ditch tackles. Alves and Alba are wingers who deign to defend once in a while.The dirty secret about Barcelona is they occasionally look more complete in match reports than they do on the pitch. Though to be fair, most of those match reports read like the grisly-beautiful climax of a pulp novel.

Barcelona lost this past weekend’s Clásico because their midfield were unimaginative, their front line couldn’t bail them out, and Real Madrid finally got their counterattacking wits about them over the last twenty minutes and surged up the pitch like a great crashing wave. Atleti are a better defensive team than their neighbors, and though they don’t have forwards quite as thoroughbred-powerful as Gareth Bale and Cristiano Ronaldo, Antoine Griezmann and Yannick Carrasco are plenty quick and Fernando Torres is doing a decent impression of his former self these days. Both of Barça’s domestic wins over Atleti have been fraught affairs, and there’s an argument to be made Los Rojiblancos outplayed Barcelona at the Nou Camp despite going down to ten men before halftime and nine men in the 65th minute.

The difference between Barça of two years ago and the Barça of now is their ability to render the play of their opponents irrelevant. Atleti could do nearly everything right and lose the tie 3-1 because the collective genius of Neymar, Messi, and Suárez proves too immense to stifle. But the quarterfinal will be a scrap, and it will be unpleasant. Because in terms of their ability to defend as a unit and deal with the mental strain of tracking every run and pass Barcelona make for 180 minutes, Atleti are every bit the team they were two years ago. Whether that’s enough to overcome the behemoth they helped create isn’t quite up to them, but they’ll put a few strong words in.