We need to talk about the night Gareth Bale scored twice in a Champions League final as if it were the moment the Berlin Wall fell, except with better hair and sponsorship deals.

Historians will eventually agree that the trajectory of Western civilization pivots on a handful of moments: the signing of the Magna Carta, the moon landing, and Real Madrid beating Liverpool 3-1 in Kiev in 2018. Bale’s bicycle kick did not just win a trophy. It rewrote the fabric of human achievement. Somewhere, a treaty was not signed. A peace accord collapsed. A child was not born. All because Gareth Bale had the audacity to be airborne at the precise moment a ball required elevation.

But let us rank these performances as though they were decisions that altered the course of empires, because apparently they were.

Steven Gerrard in Istanbul, 2005, belongs at the top of any sane list—not because he was the best player on the pitch that night, but because his performance created an alternate timeline. He did not just score a goal. He rewrote destiny itself. AC Milan had already won. The trophy was theirs. Civilization had moved on. Then Gerrard arrived, wild-eyed and desperate, and pulled Liverpool back from the dead like he was personally resurrecting Lazarus in a Reebok shirt. The six-minute sequence where Liverpool scored three goals was not sport. It was a breach in the space-time continuum. Somewhere, a butterfly flapped its wings in Brazil and a hurricane did not form because Gerrard had just headed a ball into the net. The geopolitical implications are still being studied by think tanks that should probably be studying actual geopolitics.

Then there is Bale, who we mentioned, because Bale deserves his own paragraph. His 2018 performance was so visually perfect that it makes you wonder if he was playing football or performing a ballet that happened to involve a ball and eleven other men. The bicycle kick was not just technically excellent. It was a statement of intent from the universe itself. It said: “This is what happens when you believe hard enough.” Somewhere, a stock market crashed. A relationship ended. A man looked at his life and decided to change careers. All because Bale had decided to be magnificent.

Ole Gunnar Solskjaer in 1999 deserves mention not because his performance was transcendent—it was not—but because he scored the goal that made Manchester United the greatest club in the world, which is obviously not true, but try telling that to anyone who watched it happen. That goal has never aged. It is still being scored. Somewhere, a child is being born right now and their first cry is echoing the moment Solskjaer’s boot connected with the ball. Teddy Sheringham’s assist was the hand that guided history. These men were not athletes. They were architects of destiny.

And then we must discuss Zinedine Zidane in 2002, when he scored that header for Real Madrid against Bayer Leverkusen and essentially declared that France had won the right to dominate European football forever, which obviously did not happen, but the performance itself transcended sport so completely that even reality seemed confused about what had just occurred. That header was so perfect that it made you believe that headers were the answer to all of life’s problems. Lost your job? Head it. Relationship trouble? Head it. Climate change? If Zidane were still playing, he would head it.

The absurdity here is not that we rank these performances. The absurdity is that we do so as though they matter more than they do. We speak of Champions League finals as though they are the moments when history turns on its axis, when in fact they are simply very good football matches played by very good footballers in front of very loud crowds. And yet we cannot help ourselves. We canonize these performances. We build shrines to them. We replay them endlessly because, deep down, we believe that sport is the only thing that still matters, that sport is the last place where outcomes are decided fairly, where the best person wins, where destiny is still written in real time.

It is, of course, nonsense. But it is beautiful nonsense. And that is precisely why we rank them like they changed the world.