Lewis-Skelly dazzles but Arsenal endure cruel ending to thrillingly intense final | Barney Ronay

It always seemed likely, somehow, that Arsenal’s season was going to come down to Gabriel Magalhães and a set piece. Just not, ideally, like this. Football does love a note of dramatic irony. And while Arsenal may have lost this Champions League final on penalties to Paris Saint-Germain after three brain-mangling hours of unresolved jab, smother and counter-thrust in the humid green bowl of the Puskas Arena, this was also a brilliant, high-grade, dizzyingly tense game of football. After half an hour it was already the kind of day where it becomes impossible to remember a time when this game wasn’t happening, where the Puskas Arena is just the universe now, when there is just always this single humid moment, the same rolling bowl of noise, the red, white and blue shapes, the constantly shifting patterns. Even as the game edged into penalties at 1-1 close to 9pm the night still felt like a series of weirdly vivid moments. Here is David Raya being simultaneously triple-maintained by the Arsenal pit crew, pounded on both thighs, brain fed with data by a pair of crouching men, another flooding his mouth with fresh fluids. In the stands the same Arsenal fan had been leaping up all night, stringy arms beating the air, chain bouncing, king of the stairwell, a man completely lost in this time and this place. …