But he was miserable. Of the time, he wrote, “The first few days in Liverpool were the worst ones of my life. I felt really lonely. I was in a new place with a new language, which I couldn’t speak.” All these quotes, by the way, are from Dudek’s autobiography, which he titled, A Big Pole in Our Goal. That’s the song Liverpool fans sang about him, to the tune of “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands.” We’ve got a big Pole in our goal.

Before we get to May 25, 2005, I just want to note one more thing. Professional goalkeepers spend a lot of time practicing trying to save penalty kicks. Jerzy Dudek had faced thousands of penalty kicks, and he approached them in precisely the same way: He stood stock-still in the middle of the goal until a moment before the ball was kicked, and then he dove one way or another. Always. Without exception.

The 2004–2005 season saw Liverpool go on a magical run through the Champions League, and by April they were preparing to play the famed Italian club Juventus in the quarterfinals when Pope John Paul II died. Dudek ended up on the bench for that game—he couldn’t think straight after the death of his childhood hero and found himself near tears as he confessed to the team doctor that he couldn’t play that night. Liverpool won the game nonetheless, and eventually made their way to the Champions League final, where they would play another Italian giant, AC Milan.

The final was played in Istanbul, and it began horribly for Dudek and Liverpool. Fifty-one seconds into the game, Milan scored. They scored two more goals just before halftime. Dudek’s wife, Mirella, at home in Poland preparing for their son’s first communion, recalled a “deathly silence” descending over Szczyg?owice.

Of the Liverpool locker room at halftime, Dudek wrote, “Everyone was broken.” Liverpool defender Jamie Carragher said, “My dreams had turned to dust.” The players could hear the forty thousand Liverpool fans singing “You’ll Never Walk Alone” in the stands above, but they knew it was, as Carragher put it, “in sympathy more than belief.”

The rest I know by heart, because I’ve seen it so many times. Nine minutes after the second half begins, Liverpool’s captain Steven Gerrard scores with a balletic header. Liverpool score again two minutes later, and then again four minutes after that. Now it’s tied 3–3. The match goes into thirty minutes of extra time. Milan pour on the pressure. It is so obvious that they are the better team. Liverpool’s players are exhausted, just hoping to get to a penalty shoot-out.

And then: With ninety seconds left in extra time, Jerzy Dudek makes a double save on two point-blank shots that occur within a second of each other. The save is so good that an entire chapter of A Big Pole in Our Goal is devoted to it. The save is so good that even now, fifteen years later, when I see replays of it, I still think the Milan player is going to score. But instead, Jerzy Dudek makes the save every time, and the game goes to a penalty shoot-out.

* * *

So you’re Jerzy Dudek. You’ve been practicing saving penalties since you were a kid, and you have your way of doing it. You’ve lain awake at night imagining this moment. The Champions League final, down to penalties, you in goal, standing stock-still until the moment before the ball is kicked.

But then, in the moments before the shoot-out begins, Jamie Carragher runs over to you. He jumps on your back and starts shouting. “Carra came up to me like he was crazy,” Dudek remembered. “He grabbed me and said, ‘Jerzy Jerzy Jerzy, remember Bruce Grobbelaar.’”

Carragher was screaming at him: Do the wobbly legs! Move around on the goal line! Just like in 1984! But that was twenty-one years before—with different players, a different coach, and a different opponent. What could that moment possibly have to do with this one?

There are times in your life when you do things precisely as you have practiced and prepared for them. And then there are times when you listen to Jamie Carragher. So in the most important moment of Jerzy Dudek’s professional life, he decided to try something new.

His spaghetti legs didn’t look exactly like Grobbelaar’s had, but he danced on the goal line, his legs wobbling this way and that. “I didn’t recognize my husband,” Mirella Dudek said. “I couldn’t believe he . . . danced so crazily in the goal.”

Liverpool scored all but one of their penalties. For Milan, facing the dancing Dudek, it was a different story. Milan’s first penalty taker missed the goal entirely, and then Dudek saved two of the next four penalties, and Liverpool completed what came to be known as “The Miracle of Istanbul.”

* * *

Someone tell ten-year-old Jerzy Dudek that he is going to save two penalties in a European Cup final by making the weirdest possible choice. Someone tell twenty-one-year-old Jerzy Dudek playing for $1,800 a year that he is a decade away from lifting the European Cup.

You can’t see the future coming—not the terrors, for sure, but you also can’t see the wonders that are coming, the moments of light-soaked joy that await each of us. These days, I often feel like I’m Jerzy Dudek walking out for the second half down 3–0, feeling as hopeless as I do helpless. But of all the unimportant things, football is the most important, because seeing Jerzy Dudek sprint away from that final penalty save to be mobbed by his teammates reminds me that someday—and maybe someday soon—I will also be embraced by people I love. It is May of 2020, fifteen years since Dudek’s spaghetti legs, and this will end, and the light-soaked days are coming.

I give Jerzy Dudek’s performance on May 25, 2005 five stars.

PENGUINS OF MADAGASCAR

UNLESS YOU’VE LIVED an exceptionally fortunate life, you’ve probably known someone who enjoys having provocative opinions. I am referring to the people who will say things to you like, “You know, Ringo was the best Beatle.”

You’ll take a long breath. Maybe you’re out to lunch with this person, because lunch is a time-limited experience, and you can only bear this person’s presence in minute quantities. So you’ll take a bite of your food. And then you’ll sigh again before saying, “Why was Ringo the best Beatle?”*

Well, the Provocative Opinion Person is very glad you asked. “Ringo was the best Beatle because . . .” And then you stop listening, which is the only way to get through lunch. When the person has finished you say, “Okay, but Ringo also wrote ‘Octopus’s Garden,’” and then the Provocative Opinion Person will regale you with a fourteen-minute lecture that begins, “Well, actually, ‘Octopus’s Garden’ is a work of considerable genius because . . .”

Most of us are not Provocative Opinion People, thank God. But I think everyone secretly harbors at least one provocative opinion, and this is mine: The opening sequence of the 2014 film Penguins of Madagascar is one of the greatest scenes in cinematic history.

* * *

Penguins of Madagascar is an animated kids’ movie about the Anthropocene: A villainous octopus named Dave has invented a special ray that makes cute animals ugly, so that humans will stop privileging the protection of adorable animals (like penguins) over less adorable ones (like Dave).

The movie begins as a faux nature documentary. “Antarctica, an inhospitable wasteland,” the famous documentary filmmaker Werner Herzog intones with his trademark gravitas. But even here, he tells us, “We find life. And not just any life. PENGUINS. Joyous, frolicking, waddling, cute, and cuddly life.”

A long line of penguins marches mindlessly behind an unseen leader. As Herzog calls penguins “silly little snow clowns,” we follow the line back to the three young penguins at the center of the movie, one of whom announces, “Does anyone even know where we’re marching to?”

“Who cares?” an adult penguin responds.

“I question nothing,” another adds.

Soon thereafter, the three young penguins are bowled over by an egg rolling downhill. They decide to follow the egg, which tumbles off the edge of a glacier to a shipwrecked boat below. These three little penguins now stand on the edge of a cliff, looking down at an egg about to be devoured by a leopard seal. The penguins must decide: Risk it all to save this egg, or watch as it gets eaten?

At this point, the camera zooms out, and we see the documentary crew following the penguins. “Tiny and helpless,” Herzog says, “the babies are frozen with fear. They know if they fall from this cliff, they will surely die.” And then there is a moment’s pause before Herzog says, “Günter, give them a shove.”

The sound guy uses a boom mic to whack the penguins from behind, forcing them into the great unknown. It’s a children’s movie, so of course the penguins survive and go on to great adventures. But every time I watch Penguins of Madagascar, I think of how almost all of us are invisible to penguins almost all of the time, and yet we are nonetheless their biggest threat—and also their best hope. In that respect, we are a kind of god—and not a particularly benevolent one.

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