History will have its way. One hectic month of play and laughter and tears comes to an end in a dowdy suburb of Paris tomorrow night. One month? One century. The final game of the last World Cup to be played this millennium takes place between France and Brazil, representatives of the two continents who have dominated the game.
It is a lovely final pairing, brimming with sweet possibilities and potential heroes, a game which matches the host nation with the fabled holders, entwining two romantic football stories. Underachievers grappling with brand leaders.
Brazil and France: could there have been a final more emblematic of football, its diversity and its potential?
Sixty-four games, 720 players, 161 goals, 12,000 journalists and a few ugly riots: it has all been distilled to this. A game of football.
The French have cheerfully defied the laws of footballing gravity on their way to this final. Having neglected to pack a decent goalscorer along with their kit at the start of the tournament, they have soared anyway.
What began as a wafer-thin hope of glory has become a passion for the French. A competition which they organised with genial detachment has lately turned into an odyssey. On Wednesday, after the French worked their passage to their first final, the car horns were still sounding and the songs were still echoing when dawn broke the next day.
Little wonder they withheld their affections. Three times their team had broken their hearts by reaching semi-finals with potent swagger only to fall. Brazil put five goals past them in 1958, and then, more traumatically, West Germany dismissed the greatest French team ever in successive semi-finals in the 1980s.
The Brazilians know no such desolation. They may be wistful as always for the poetic teams which forged their football history and philosophy, but they have become accustomed to the sterner realities of the modern game and the blank assertion of their beloved coach, Mario Zagallo, that he would rather win an ugly game than lose a beautiful one. Tomorrow they look for a fifth world title.
Zagallo's pragmatic dictum seems made for World Cup final matches, hype-bloated occasions where teams strangled by tension and tiredness often ignore the higher callings of the beautiful game and settle for willful ugliness.
France and Brazil have the capacity for something greater than that, though. They have men who can make music out of it, players whose feet move to the ancient rhythms of the game.
The French are a polyglot bunch, with players drawn from all sectors of their community, players born of emigrant stock, players born in Guadaloupe, Ghana, Senegal and Algeria, a team which looks like modern France whose success has stifled those National Front voices who asked with bile why France could not be represented by their notion of "Frenchmen".
They have a brave-hearted defence, some midfield sorcerers, an anemic attack and will look to Zinedine Zidane for their creativity. The son of Algerian emigrants, raised in the rough quarter of Marseille, he made the journey from there to the riches on offer at Juventus of Turin.
The Brazilians, another melting pot team, are still marvelling at the blossoming of their icon Ronaldo. Plucked by Dutch scouts from the streets of Sao Paolo while still a spotty teenager, he has become the world's greatest player, and if he hasn't stamped his authority all over this tournament, he has produced enough wonderful moments to make his own highlights film.
The sight of a packed and brilliant French defence facing down an inventive and instinctive Brazilian attack suggests that even if it is 12 years since a goal was scored in open play in a World Cup final, there will be enough intrigue in this game to hold the attention.
The French have promised not to be intimidated by the famous sunflower yellow shirts of the Brazilians, but the magnitude of the occasion has been dawning slowly.
"We will all be playing the match of our lives and it's important we savour every moment. It's a dream come true for all of us," said Lilian Thuram, the scholarly full back who scored both of France's goals in the semi-final. They chanted his name for hours on the ChampsElysees.
The Brazilians have been here before, as recently as four years ago when they won their fourth title. Expectation outweighs anticipation.
"France have been our gracious hosts, but we have a job to complete. I hope that together we can provide a memorable final," said Zagallo, who was a player in 1958 on the other occasion when the teams met late in a tournament.
So it goes. This tournament has reached a wonderful climax, a peak where the atmosphere is distinct and rare. The sense of being on the brink, of having almost arrived, pervades all of France.
Lionel Jospin has called it the most beautiful story in French sports history. The Tour de France has been relegated to a cloudy footnote. Le Monde, the haughtiest of the quality French dailies, usually disdainful of sport, has been can-canning, showing a bit of tabloid garter.
On the avenues and boulevards where enslavement to the cult of the replica jersey is still just a baffling foreign disease, the young people walk with small red white and blue tricolours greasepainted to their cheeks or upper arms. Over cafe tables cooled by umbrella shade, they sip their espressos and lament for Laurent Blanc, the totemic defender unjustly sent off in the semi-final and deprived of a place at tomorrow's banquet. They whisper of Zidane's meteorological unpredictability and Djorkaeff's distressingly prosaic form.
They implore the gods to make it all come right, just once in the Stade de France in St Denis, Paris, on a Sunday night in July, when the novel written in blue ink reaches its final page.
