"Yes! Yes! Yes!"
Inzaghi had practically burst onto the pitch the instant the goal went in.
What made it even more extraordinary was that Inzaghi did not run toward the attacking end but sprinted straight to Leon at the back.
Torres followed right behind him, and every single AC Milan player converged on Leon to celebrate.
At some point without anyone quite noticing, whenever AC Milan scored, regardless of whether Leon had been directly involved, every player on the squad made a beeline for him.
This peculiar celebration ritual had somehow lifted the cohesion within the AC Milan squad to an entirely new level.
Diego López, having already decided to leave at the end of the season, had no reason to make a scene about it anymore.
As for the backup goalkeeper Agazzi, well, nobody at AC Milan was paying him much attention at all.
Then there were minor irritants like Donnarumma, who could only sit in the youth team watching Leon's relentless dominant performances with a mixture of admiration, envy, and frustration.
"Hey, Pippo, this looks really bad — get off the pitch now!"
The referee had to rush over and usher Inzaghi back to the touchline.
A manager running onto the pitch was technically against the rules.
In practice, though, referees almost always dealt with it through a reminder rather than applying any actual punishment.
The interesting thing was that whenever a referee had been given an agenda to cause problems in a particular match, they would simply send the manager straight off, and that, paradoxically, was entirely within the rules.
Decisions of this nature cropped up regularly across football.
They were tools that could be deployed at convenient moments.
Take a certain Champions League group stage match from years back: when Barcelona were taking a corner, AC Milan's defender Nesta made the most ordinary, barely perceptible shirt-pull with his hand and was immediately penalised for a penalty, even before the corner had actually been taken.
Completely absurd.
You could not really say it was against the rules, but if a referee applied that same standard consistently throughout an entire match, the scoreline would start looking like a basketball game.
On the touchline, watching Inzaghi's ecstatic celebrations, Allegri felt his composure beginning to slip.
Everything had been unfolding exactly as Allegri had planned, without a single surprise.
Then Leon had pushed up into the attacking half.
A goalkeeper had just casually run into the attacking half.
Was this genuinely not a joke?
This was not the desperate final minute where you throw everyone forward.
How did he dare?
And how had Inzaghi, as head coach, ever agreed to it?
Allegri felt as though everything he understood about football was being shattered.
Even Neuer had not yet started charging directly into the attacking half to join the build-up play.
At most, he operated as a sweeper keeper, cutting out through balls from deep within his own half.
It was not only Allegri: countless commentators across every broadcast had momentarily lost their words in that instant.
The same scene was playing out in the commentary booth back in the East.
One second, Donny had been criticising Leon's decision as completely reckless, arguing that as a goalkeeper he had chosen the worst possible option.
The next second, he had nothing to say at all.
Although deep down he still believed Leon had been acting completely out of turn.
That kind of thing had no place happening on a football pitch.
Jackson beside him, true to his usual high-energy style, simply let out a long string of exclamations and left it at that.
The contrast between the two commentary styles could not have been more obvious.
On the touchline, Allegri called Pirlo and Vidal over and spoke quietly to both of them.
As the undisputed heartbeat of the midfield, Pirlo and Vidal between them were capable of dictating the entire rhythm of the match.
Pogba, who had also tried to wander over and get involved, found himself completely ignored.
"Hmph."
'I'll be the one controlling this midfield before long.'
Pogba muttered to himself in irritation and walked away.
Pogba's wish did actually come true, as it happened.
In the following season of Leon's previous life, Pirlo left for MLS.
Vidal joined Bayern.
Juventus's midfield had no one left to lean on but Pogba.
Pogba duly stepped up from understudy to the leading role.
As for how that worked out, well, that was a matter of perspective.
The match continued.
Only about ten minutes of normal time remained.
If neither side scored again, the match would go to thirty minutes of extra time.
If extra time also ended level, it would go to a penalty shootout.
After conceding, Juventus had clearly abandoned the defensive block.
But Inzaghi's relentlessness had plainly gone beyond anything Allegri had anticipated.
Inzaghi showed not the slightest intention of pulling his side back; the instruction remained to attack to the very end.
The AC Milan players had long since adjusted to Inzaghi's approach, so the mentality across the whole squad was completely unified.
Keep attacking and nothing else.
It was actually Juventus's players who showed a flicker of uncertainty.
Pulling out of a deep defensive setup and shifting into an attacking mindset naturally took time.
Forwards like Morata and Tevez clearly wanted to push forward and score again as quickly as possible.
The connection between Juventus's midfield and attack became slightly disjointed.
Leon dropped back inside the penalty area at this point and stopped pushing forward recklessly.
That was because Morata and Tevez were still pinned at the top of the pitch rather than tracking back.
Leon could not genuinely hand them an empty net.
The ninetieth minute arrived with neither side having scored again.
Extra time was looking inevitable.
Both sets of players instinctively eased off slightly, mentally preparing to wind down these final two minutes before the additional period.
Then, at that very moment, the relentless Menez was still grinding away at his dribbling.
After going past Pogba again, Menez found Chiellini charging in and simply went down.
Mostly because he had no energy left, Menez just let himself fall.
The referee's whistle sounded.
In the very last moments of the match, AC Milan were awarded a free kick in the attacking half.
The Juventus players swarmed around the referee, furious at the decision.
The referee paid no attention to any of them.
He had a clear, unobstructed view of the incident and had seen it cleanly: Chiellini had tripped Menez.
"Calm down, stop arguing — we just need to hold this."
Buffon called out from his goal line.
AC Milan did not have a set-piece specialist on the pitch at that moment, so the free kick should not have posed too much of a threat.
With their captain speaking, the Juventus players dropped the argument and began forming the wall on Buffon's instructions.
Then Buffon suddenly spotted a player in a strikingly different shirt colour walking up to the spot where the free kick was to be taken.
The goalkeeper. Leon.
Leon had walked up to take the free kick.
Not one of the other AC Milan players raised any objection to that choice.
And in that instant, Buffon jolted awake.
Bloody hell.
How had he forgotten about Leon?
If he remembered correctly, Leon had scored an unstoppable knuckleball in the Milan Derby.
The pressure on Buffon suddenly became immense.
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