Let’s say we get off this rock. To the moon. Before nuclear annihilation or the atmosphere turns to an oven door, you and I and some five thousand other people build a ship and learn to terraform and I never got through the NOVA special on this subject so you’re just going to have to trust me that we figure it out. We’re living the best lunar lives we can, working for MoonCorp and sleeping in on weekends and forging relationships. We circle the Earth for thirty years and grow old. This whole time we’ve been watching it deteriorate, the lights that go on at night slowly dwindling in number, the oceans swallowing the land. We imagine what it would be like to still be there. We’re doing fine on the moon, but part of us wants to go back, because that’s where we feel we’re supposed to be. You can live somewhere for decades and it won’t feel like home if you didn’t grow up there. You wish you could bring all of this stuff you like about where you are now to the place that’s home, that you could renovate it. Of course that’s impossible—what you really want is to be sixteen again, but happier than you were at sixteen—but it’s not a silly desire. There will always be times and places we hold dear to which we can never return, and it feels like we’re missing a part of ourselves because of it. 

It’s not right to me that Milan aren’t great. I don’t mean it’s cosmically wrong, just that I see Milan squeaking into the Europa League and it doesn’t jibe with my idea of what they are, which is informed mostly by the fact that when I first started watching the sport, they were, if not the best club in the Europe, the continent’s most stylish princelings. This was circa 2007, at the tail end of Milan’s Champions League dominance, before Barcelona were fifty-six short passes and a tap-in and while Juventus were still rebuilding their strength after the Calciopoli scandal. Milan had Kaká and Pirlo and Clarence Seedorf and a chubby-yet-intermittently-ebullient Brazilian Ronaldo and when they were on, which wasn’t all the time, they melded a distinctly Italian stinginess with a delicate attacking grace. Though they weren’t that legible to me at the the time. I just liked Kaká’s first touch and how Pirlo seemed to control games without ever running.

So watching Milan’s recent decline—a washed up Michael Essien biffing tackles in those red and black stripes—has been particularly saddening. It’s like one of my favorite TV shows fell off hard and started using voiceover. Which is why I welcome, against my better judgment, investment from a Chinese billionaire of dubious repute—to be fair, it would be hard to be a worse human being or more crooked businessman than Silvio Berlusconi—trying to buy his way back into the Champions League. $49 million for Leonardo Bonucci, $44 million for André Silva, $50 million combined on Ricardo Rodriguez and Andrea Conti. Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang and Arturo Vidal rumors. A new contract for Gigi Donnarumma. Sure, whatever it takes—[double-checks with Wikipedia]—Li Yonghong (born September 1969). 

The possibility of an ascendant and newly wealthy Milan is also exciting because the Champions League has gotten a whit stagnant lately. It’s not just that Real Madrid have won three of the last four titles, but that we’re getting more or less the same jumble of clubs in the quarterfinals every year. It’s almost always Madrid, Atleti, Barcelona, PSG, Bayern, Juve, and then a couple more teams from a relatively small pool. We’re due for some new blood, or at least some new colors. And I don’t know about you, but Manchester United could fail to qualify for the Champions League for a century and the minute they showed up in the knockout rounds, my reaction would be oof, these dudes again.

Not that Milan are on the brink of challenging Madrid and Bayern. This is the beginning of a project that’s going to take at least three or four years, and the problem with moneybags owners who show up trying to drastically overhaul a club is they often get bored or cash-strapped after two summers and scale back spending. Dmitry Rybolovlev was supposed to turn Monaco into the new Chelsea and though Monaco are quite good they’re now run more like a business than a luxury club. Peter Lim bought Valencia a few years ago, renegotiated their debts, set well north of a hundred million dollars on fire by signing overpriced Jorge Mendes clients, and Los Che have been a fan-alienating disaster ever since. These gambits rarely work out as swimmingly as you might imagine they will, and they’re doubly difficult in the Financial Fair Play era. If Milan don’t finish in the top four of Serie A this season, they’re going to have to sell off half the players they just bought in order to balance the books. Roma and Napoli might be better. Inter have done some decent business and hired Luciano Spalletti. Juve are Juve. This is far from a sure thing.

But this jolting uncertainty beats the hell out of wan Milan squads relying on a somnambulant Carlos Bacca to bring them back against Cagliari. Even if I can’t go back to the days when Milan were pirouetting profs who expanded my understand of what soccer could be—experiences are only that new once— I’ll eagerly accept a reboot. And maybe someone else will get to grow to love the sport loving this particular group of rossoneri. They’ll stand in the place I’m merely remembering and actually live.

More 'End-To-End Stuff': Paris Saint-GermainChelseaManchester CityTottenham HotspurManchester UnitedAtletico MadridBarcelonaReal MadridBayern MunichBorussia Dortmund, Juventus