Don’t you dare try to explain Liverpool’s Champions League semifinal comeback

Liverpool completed an historic comeback against Barcelona to make their second Champions League final in as many seasons.

If you can’t win, fail beautifully. That was Jurgen Klopp’s message to his players before Liverpool’s Champions League semifinal second leg against Barcelona at Anfield on Tuesday. Even after Divock Origi gave them the lead in the seventh minute, that seemed like the realistic height of their ambition.

Without Mohamed Salah, Roberto Firmino and Naby Keita, three of their four best attacking players, Liverpool needed to win by four clear goals to advance past a Barcelona side that had decimated them on the counter-attack as the Reds threw men forward in the closing stages of the first leg at the Camp Nou. This side don’t do realism, it seems.

If the sheer implausibility of the result itself wasn’t enough, consider the identity of the goalscorers and, while we’re at it, the manner of the goals themselves. First, Origi, who has started only five games this season and has scored six goals, including one to win the Merseyside derby, one to keep Liverpool in the Premier League title race with a match remaining and two here.

The first was a tap-in after Marc-Andre ter Stegen parried Jordan Henderson’s shot into his path. The second, Liverpool’s fourth, the goal that sent them through, was as weird as they come, Origi turning in from close range after Trent Alexander-Arnold took a corner while no one on Barca’s team was paying attention.

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The other goalscorer was Georginio Wijnaldum, who came off the bench only because Andy Robertson picked up an injury in the first half and who scored twice in three minutes to make it 3-0. This only a week after failing to record a single shot while playing as a center forward at the Camp Nou last week. His second goal came on only his sixth touch of the game.

The temptation now will be to make sense of this, to explain how Klopp engineered the second greatest comeback in Liverpool history (no, this doesn’t top Istanbul), how Barcelona let a three-goal first-leg lead slip in this competition for the second year in a row. Resist this temptation. Submit yourself to the sheer, unbridled nonsense of this result.

The sheer, unbridled nonsense of this tie, for that matter. For the second leg was in some sense a mirror of the first. These were two closely fought games between two closely matched teams. Where in the first leg Lionel Messi turned a relatively even game into a lopsided one, here Anfield was the biggest difference.

Perhaps neither of those things should surprise us any more. Messi has been turning even games into lopsided ones for a decade. Anfield’s tradition of historic European nights goes back much longer than that. Origi’s trick of scoring the dumbest possible goals in the highest-leverage moments isn’t even a new one. And yet!

Whoever they face in the final, Ajax or Tottenham, Liverpool will be favorites now. In Klopp’s third Champions League final, it will be the first time he’s been able to say that. And it’s tempting here to point out that, well, you know, this side seem to perform better as underdogs … the way they set up … their mentality. Resist that temptation, too. Submit, submit to the madness.