Sergio Aguero’s phenomenally prolific career will remain defined by one moment - a moment that, in large part, defines a 127-year-old football club and the Premier League itself.
But Aguero’s relentless hunger for goals meant that his unforgettable deed against Queens Park Rangers was also finishing something he started 32 days earlier when all hope seemed lost.
Between April 11 and May 13, 2012, he embarked upon an incredible month that would change the lives of Manchester City fans forever.
That might sound a little dramatic, or ridiculously grand - but we’re not talking about a seismic shift.
The day after the Aguero moment, City fans awoke in various states of bleariness and went about their business. If you made the hideous error of inexplicably failing to book Monday, May 14 2012 as a holiday, you went to work.
Football is not the matter of life or death Bill Shankly once famously claimed, but nor is it the escape from real life we like to celebrate it as either.
It exists alongside our everyday existence, woven through moments of private and personal joy, pain and mundanity.
Fight 'til the end
Everything about that month is personally still incredibly vivid, save for perhaps the 1am to 5am section of May 14.
As I waited outside entrance E at the Etihad Stadium to meet my family before City played West Brom, everything from the weather downwards felt gloomy and pointless.
Roberto Mancini’s side had lost in chaotic fashion 1-0 at Arsenal on Easter Sunday. They were eight points behind Manchester United with six games to play. This was done.
We all trudged into the ground with a sense of vague duty. No one expected to have much fun, we were just doing that thing we do most weeks. For every Aguero moment, there are dozens more like this as a football fan.
But Sergio wasn’t going through the motions. Goodness knows, he never was. In the sixth minute, he dropped into midfield, drove at the Albion defence and smashed home from 25 yards.
We’d all given up, but he hadn’t. He got his second in a dizzying spell of three goals in 10 minutes after half-time and, after the final whistle, we learnt United had lost at Wigan.
“United are a fantastic team and I don’t think that they can lose five points,” Mancini said afterwards, launching into his run-in mantra.
Aeroplanes and golf holidays
“It’s on like Donkey Kong!” was the contrasting appraisal of a very dear friend who’d worked in Manchester that day and was crashing on our sofa. A non-City fan, he sent pictures of the all-action ape at various key points across the remainder of the season.
My girlfriend was also staying over. She was about to start a new job in Malta and we were going to try a long-distance relationship.
Three days later, I accompanied her to Terminal One at Manchester Airport and returned to my flat alone in the dark. Thankfully, City were the early kick-off at Norwich.
You know those times when you think, “God, I really hope they win today…” as if a lifetime of fandom entities you to football players you don’t know having a positive impact on your mood? Well, I thought it that day, big time.
City were incredible. It’s remembered as the Carlos Tevez golf celebration game and Mancini’s previously AWOL star helped himself to a hat-trick, but Aguero was simply sensational. His two goals were mini-masterpieces.
If it felt like something might be happening, it definitely was when United somehow contrived to draw 4-4 with Everton the following weekend. It was now back in City’s hands, but the swagger of the Norwich display sunk into a pit of nerves against a Wolves side doomed to relegation.
Then Sergio scored. Of course he did. And all was well again.
Funerals and wedding receptions
It was on to a winner-takes-all derby that would precede two routine wins (ha!). Marooned on an unfamiliar island and yet to really meet any new people, my girlfriend went to watch City alone in a bar for the first and only time in her life.
Aguero didn’t score but it didn’t matter, because Vincent Kompany did. Then Yaya Toure did twice at Newcastle - goals all worthy of being the symbols of a long-awaited title triumph. But then Sergio, fate and the general absurdity of that game against QPR had other ideas.
A little over a year later, I also moved out to Malta, settling happily into an ex-pat community of people from all around the world. Whenever it came up in conversation that I was a City fan, the question of whether I was there for the Aguero goal usually followed.
It still often does and I still give my recollections in what must be irritatingly granular detail. Sergio is social currency like no other.
Natalie and I got married in 2018. Chris, he of the remarkably prescient Donkey Kong gag, was the best man. Aguero was mentioned in the speeches. To be clear, this wasn’t a wedding with City crests on all the suits and bridesmaids dressed as Moonbeam.
At a funeral a couple of months ago, my dad gave a beautiful eulogy for his best friend. Again Sergio’s goal featured in an anecdote.
This is how it feels to be City
You don’t make the big, important stuff about football. But it’s there as familiar background noise, a reference point to make us smile and reminisce together, in the best and the worst moments and all of those in between.
Football is the most important of the unimportant things. In an age where we increasingly lack a collective experience, it’s there as a golden thread knitting us together. And Aguero gave City fans the most euphoric, unimaginable and perfect collective strand of them all.
It is perhaps a bit much to say he changed our lives. But he altered our lives because he became a part of them - a part of the stories we tell, the people we meet, the memories we hold dear and the other times we’d rather forget.
That’s an incredible legacy, worth the weight of his huge trophy collection and more. It is also one that should comfort him during these sad days of new retirement and beyond.
Thank you, Sergio.
What's your favourite memory of Sergio Aguero? Follow the City Is Ours editor Dom Farrell on Twitter to get involved in the discussion and give us your thoughts in the comments section below.
