MANCHESTER, England -- Pep Guardiola had said this would be like a final for Manchester City. It may not quite have been that momentous in the short term, but the longer view is that what happened at the Etihad on Tuesday night may reverberate far into the future.
Rarely has the Etihad Stadium rocked as it did from the moment Ilkay Gundogan, in a moment completely out of keeping with the game's pattern, rendered Barcelona's near-total control virtually irrelevant. And rarely have City delivered anything of this manner in Europe against the very best.
The 3-2 victories over Bayern Munich in 2013 and 2014, the former coming while the Bavarians were reigning holders, live in the memory and there was the night last season when Kevin De Bruyne drove them past Paris Saint-Germain and into the semifinals. But this felt like another level, both of performance and of rapture inside a venue that has tended to hold Champions League football at arm's length.
As a broken Barcelona left the pitch, with several players making straight for the tunnel upon full-time, the impression was that Manchester City have arrived as a Champions League force after their 3-1 win Tuesday.
First they must reach the last 16 of this season's competition, of course, but few can envisage a sequence of results that would allow Borussia Monchengladbach or Celtic to overhaul them on evidence this persuasive. If City were fortunate to be allowed back into the game by a defensive error, the relentlessness of what followed left a far firmer impression.
The speed and -- this is the key -- ambition with which they tore into Barcelona, who can rarely have played a more subdued half on English soil than the second 45 minutes here, made for a manner of victory more convincing that any Premier League side has achieved against these opponents for more than a decade.
History was on Guardiola's mind afterwards. On the one hand, this was a night for the ages -- one that sets the standard for all who follow in City's colours. On the other it was just one night, one imperfect night at the start of a journey that must take years.
"This club was out of Europe for 25, 30 years," Guardiola said. "That's a long time, while clubs like Barcelona, Real Madrid and Bayern Munich were playing every year. You need time. Maybe today is a good step, and we say once in our lives we played against the best team and competed against them. Maybe in a different way, playing more long balls, because we are still not ready to keep the ball like them. They are 25 years playing in that way -- we are three or four months trying to play in a different way.
"Now they realise we've beaten the best team and that we're able to do that. Generations in the future will realise that these guys beat the best team and they have to do it again. That is the process.
"It's not like we are just going to create one team that is the best in Europe. You need 10 years, 15 years, 20 years to stay there."
That is unarguable and one only has to recall the short-lived euphoria of Arsenal's dramatic win over a Guardiola-managed Barcelona in 2011 to understand that one-off triumphs need not be defining. So this was at once a tempering of expectations and an entreaty to ensure the evening was kind of watershed night it felt like.
Guardiola said City's performance in the first 38 minutes, when a second Barcelona goal to follow Lionel Messi's opener increasingly felt inevitable, was of a level that couldn't compete with the best teams in the world. What followed was a tempest few could have survived and it owed much to the redeployment of De Bruyne, a virtual irrelevance on the left flank during the first half, into a second-striker position behind Sergio Aguero. His sweetly-hit free-kick, which caught Marc-Andre ter Stegen unaware, was his first serious contribution of the game but the tone he set thereafter, knitting City's attacks together while leading a high-octane central bloc in the press, changed the dynamic completely.
Almost as advanced as De Bruyne was Gundogan, to whom Guardiola spent a sizeable portion of the opening 10 minutes giving detailed directions from the touchline. The midfielder isn't known for his work on the front foot, but his tenacity and precision in the opposition half on Tuesday night were ceaseless, and his two goals -- he now has five for City -- came about through bold and intelligent positioning.
Those were the clearest decisive factors, but it would be a long summary that detailed every success story in the City side. Of wider consequence is that despite Guardiola's protestations about the style of his team, this felt as much a defining occasion for team and manager as it did the club's European prospects.
Preposterous though it was to shine too harsh a light on the six-game winless run that ended at West Brom on Saturday, it takes little more than that to raise the alarm in a climate that demands short-term success. This was a display to burst any developing narrative questioning Guardiola's ability to prepare a Premier League team appropriately; it tightens, in a crucial way, the perception of affinity between the Spaniard and his new club.
"The players didn't deserve six winless games," Guardiola said. "I said to them that the football is first and sometimes we will come back winless." That is why he had not been too downhearted after the 4-0 reverse at the Nou Camp two weeks ago, a performance that he reiterated was -- until Claudio Bravo's red card -- better than the patchy opening half displayed here.
Taken as a whole, these were two curious, error-strewn meetings between sides who both had spells of ascendancy in matches that ultimately saw them well-beaten; they were matches in which both sides' ferociousness in the press led to sometimes chaotic, yet mesmeric, spectacles. When it all shook out this time, City came up with something historic; the task, now, is to make sure Guardiola is still talking about finals in May and beyond.
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