Liverpool are back in the Champions League final and I don’t know what to do with my hands

Liverpool are in the Champions League final. Liverpool are in the Champions League final. I’ve had three weeks to get used to the idea, but somehow it still hasn’t quite sunk in yet. Once upon a time that wouldn’t be such a surprising thing — exciting, certainly, but there was a time that Liverpool were always in the conversation for the top spots in Europe. But those days seemed long gone, and before this season, Liverpool’s star was well below the kind of teams you’d expect to see in the final.

This season has been a wild one for Liverpool fans, new and old alike. For myself, I’ve been following the team since the 2003-2004 season, pulled into the fold thanks to a high school friend who grew up near Anfield before moving to the United States. I was thrilled beyond belief to see the Reds shock the world in the 2005 Champions League final in the Miracle of Istanbul, and my young, naive self assumed that was more or less how it would always be.

Oh, you sweet summer child.

2007’s loss in the Champions League final hurt, but not as much as watching Liverpool start to slowly fade over the next few years. The 2008/2009 season had promise in the form of Rafa Benitez — architect of that 2005 Champions-league winning team — guiding the team to an incredible second-place Premier League run. Unfortunately, a brutally disappointing elimination in the Champions League quarter-finals at the hands of Chelsea and their failure to catch Manchester United for the EPL title was an unfortunate herald of things to come.

The next season, they finished seventh in the EPL and failed to get out of the Champions League group stage. Benitez left, Roy Hodgson came in, and things got worse — Liverpool flirted with the relegation battle before Hodgson was dismissed, but even the legendary Kenny Dalglish could only briefly stabilize the team before his own tenure back in charge ended after just 18 months.

At that point, Liverpool had failed to qualify for the Champions League for three seasons, something that Brendan Rodgers could not fix in his first season in charge. He’d get them back there after finishing second in the EPL in his second season at the helm, but a lack of squad depth, a lack of top-end quality, and a shocking lack of ideas sent them out of the Champions League in short order and tumbling down the EPL table over the next year-plus. with Rodgers getting unceremoniously sacked after failing to win the Merseyside Derby at home in October 2015, just over 10 years after the last time Liverpool lifted the Champions League trophy.

All throughout these years, Liverpool fans had to endure. We went from being fans of a team people feared to face to a team often thought of as a joke by opposing fanbases — sometimes rightfully so. We fans were roundly mocked for trying to cling to the vestiges of past successes while the current team couldn’t measure up to years past. Meanwhile, Liverpool lurched from failure to scandal to disappointment with shocking regularity in that dark decade, and while the support was always there from the fans, we questioned the club in ways we never had before.

By the end of Dalglish’s tenure, fans were demanding that the massively important club icon be sacked, which once would have been unthinkable. Likewise, we were actively revolting against Rodgers by the time he was sacked, and far too often in the years after Hodgson’s appointment in 2010, Anfield Road sounded more like a library than the raucous nightmare for opponents to visit than it had once been.

Then Jurgen Klopp arrived, and things started to change.

Sure, it took awhile. Liverpool would finish in just eighth place at the end of the 2015/2016 campaign, but with a squad that had been plagued by poor personnel decisions over the past decade. With Klopp in charge, the squad started working harder, and changes in their off-pitch decision making started yielding some improved results. The squad got deeper and more aggressive in ways that suited their manager beautifully, and the acquisitions of players like Sadio Mane and Joel Matip — plus the better usage of the likes of Roberto Firmino and Nathaniel Clyne — helped push the club up to fourth place and Champions League qualification coming into the current season.

And that’s when the wild ride started for real.

Bolstered by the signings of Mo Salah, Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain, Andy Robertson, and eventually Virgil Van Djik, plus the emergence of academy product Trent Alexander-Arnold, Liverpool rose. And rose. And rose. A few rough stretches of their Premier League campaign kept them from finishing higher than fourth for a second consecutive season, but they scored 23 goals while winning their Champions League group with ease before barnstorming through the knockout rounds. Porto fell with a whimper, Manchester City were humiliated, and despite a brilliant late fight-back, AS Roma were sunk in the semifinals.

But more than the success they found on the pitch, Liverpool’s new momentum and spirit help re-energize a fanbase that desperately needed it. Gone were the questions. Instead of doubt and uncertainty over almost any matchup, Liverpool fans found their confidence again. We basked in the joy of their new fearsome trident of attackers in Salah, Firmino, and Mane. We reveled in the efficiency of an ever-improving midfield — and most importantly, we made Anfield a place to fear. The singing was back. The chants were back. The passion was back. It took far too long, but the rollercoaster ride that Liverpool fans were on for so many years had us loving life and enjoying being Liverpool fans again. The loyalty had always been there, and it was finally being rewarded again, and we gave back that energy tenfold.

Now it’s time to see where this season ends. For better or for worse, Liverpool fans will be full-throated in their support of a team that we’ve always loved. They might lose, but Liverpool fans are back in the promised land, and right now it feels like we’re back where we belong and want to stay. If they win Saturday, we Liverpool fans will be rapturous in our joy. Lose, and we’ll be desolate in defeat — but we’ll still be back next year. We’ll always be back next year, no matter what. If the last 13 years have proved anything, it’s that.