From today we are in uncharted territory, proceeding by feel. Living without FrancoBaresi (written exactly like that, a unique phrase, a category of the spirit and at the same time a daily certainty), we have no idea how to do it. Not only those who, like the writer, grew up as Milan fans while watching him raise any Cup to the sky, indeed because they saw him raise any Cup to the sky. But also anyone who knows the intuitive truth of Pier Paolo Pasolini, for whom football is «the last sacred representation of our time». And one cannot help but think of the highest officiating cleric of this surviving liturgy, Diego Armando Maradona, who one day in 1989, after yet another episode of an endless duel, came out wearing the number 6 Milan jersey. «This belongs to a great player. This is a memory I will carry for my whole life». A whole life. For our whole life, FrancoBaresi, you have been the Captain. The one who wore the armband, of course. But, again, football is transcendence, it overflows from the field and is reflected in what Edmund Husserl called the «lifeworld», indeed it helps redefine its symbolic coordinates.
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FrancoBaresi was the Captain in the lifeworld of each of us, an ideal type immersed in the pragmatic reserve of a provincial Lombard (Travagliato, a town of 13,000 souls in the province of Brescia but also a destiny, the value of effort, defending, uprooting the ball, starting again with head held high) who was orphaned at 14, and made San Siro his new home. A stadium as the stage of the world, and the former Piscinin, the eighteen-year-old who won the star scudetto receiving the stigmata from Gianni Rivera, inventing a new perfection in the role. The eternal Captain, Baresi as a hieratic mask and residual certainty, while everything flows, the European Cups becoming the Champions League, the popular toy becoming global (thanks also to the President, that Silvio Berlusconi who retired the number 6 of Milan forever, because no other back could bear its weight), Italy still a child of the boom and of Tutto il calcio minuto per minuto which became the Italy of pay-tv and the Second Republic. But the Captain was there, is there and will be (because FrancoBaresi is there, standing with his arm raised, who put Time offside, the dimension in which we have remained trapped). A comforting automatism, the testimony that one can live up to oneself, and if we are not, we chose it, the alibis are zero, they are aborted counterattacks. You can be relegated to Serie B with Milan, desperately clinging to your own jersey, despite half of Italy looking for you, against all economic and calculating logic.
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And then you can climb back up and win everything, again and again, the European Cup as a habit and the Intercontinental Cup as a pastime, because a man when he is truly up to himself is never finished, in fall as in triumph. It is the hubris of the Captain, it is FrancoBaresi as an Ulysses figure, more Homeric than Nolan, it is the sliding tackle as epic, the jersey out of the shorts as an exception, a semi-divine exception. FrancoBaresi was the constant reminder that man can (and perhaps in his essence must) aspire to great deeds, that you can face Real Madrid in the European Cup and win 5-0 and that regret is a self-exculpatory deception, only will and the act that pursues it count. It does not matter that you tear your meniscus in the group stage against Norway, USA ’94 World Cup. What matters is the operation, the pain pushed back, the return to the field 25 days later, against every clinical notion, the superhuman match played by the Captain: Romario nullified.
Even on that cursed evening, even with the final cramps and the tears tearing him apart after the penalty kicked over the crossbar, FrancoBaresi reminded us of the ordinariness of the extraordinary. It is an oxymoron, but it is also the highest peak of that ultimately oxymoronic being that is man. The very fact that the Captain existed testified that the peak exists, that one is not condemned to the pettiness of the plain, that one can ascend. FrancoBaresi was ultimately one of the last signs, imprinted in that strange tangential universe that is football, of the granite value of History inside the postmodern mess of fluidity, social scrolling, the idolatry of the relative. The Captain was perhaps the last Absolute, and unfortunately we will have to train ourselves to live without him.
