HOW big is this? Richard Keys, the Sky Sports presenter, has been known to turn to one of his guests before an important match, and solemnly ask: "How big is this?"
And though they may be talking about West Brom v Southampton at the lower end of the table, the guest will usually oblige. "It's massive," he will say. "It's a massive, massive, game."
So, this leaves us with a problem, as we reflect on Liverpool's defeat of Chelsea in the semi-final of the Champions League.
How big is this?
As we try to figure out the size of things, to gain some sort of perspective on our lives, we are left shaking our heads in wonderment, as we ask ourselves again and again: how big is this?
To say it is massive, massive a hundred times over, would be a ludicrous understatement.
No, we must come to a deeper understanding of what we have experienced over the two legs of this astonishing football match. We have to somehow grasp the scale of it, in the overall context of the times in which we live, and of world history.
And frankly, using all the powers available to us, that can't be done. The human mind is not equipped to deal with matters of this magnitude. This is something which became clear in the course of wide-ranging discussions with Liverpool supporters, before, during, and after these games.
This was bigger than all of us. The idea of actually beating Chelsea, the new Evil Empire, to qualify for the Champions League final, was a prospect too good to take in, too pure for we flawed humans. For this, you needed the perspective, not of Richard Keys, but of Charlton Heston himself, in biblical mode.
How big is this? Charlton Heston would look off into the distance with a noble expression, and intone: it is a notion so great, it is not for the minds of men, but for the mind of God.
So the main thing we have established, at the beginning of this week, is that there is a God. There is a God, at least in the Charlton Heston sense. And he is a good God. Unless, of course, you are Chelsea. As far as they're concerned, if there was a God, they'd have bought him by now. They can still get through life using their rational minds, tricked up with perhaps the odd bit of superstition, such as wearing odd socks, like Lord Henry Mount Charles.
But with Liverpool on their way to the final in Istanbul, even they must be inclined to believe that there is indeed a Higher Power, that our all-too-human resources can take us on part of the journey, but that the human person, even in his most enlightened form, is simply not equipped to contemplate certain things. Because certain things, basically, are just too big.
How big is this? At one level it is massive beyond comprehension. Yet there was a moment towards the end of the match at Anfield when it all came down to something so infinitesimally small, there is again no human measurement for it.
With nearly six minutes of injury time gone, six brutal minutes which gave us a real understanding of the meaning of an eternity spent in Hell, the ball fell to Gudjohnsen of Chelsea, perhaps six yards from the Liverpool goal, to the right. With flailing red-shirted defenders and blue-shirted attackers all spreadeagled across the goal, as Gudjohnsen drew back his foot to bury the ball in the back of the net, the world stopped. All was momentarily frozen, the players like characters in some medieval painting, bearing expressions of hope, of desperation, of horror.
This moment, when the world stopped, will continue to traumatise millions of people for the rest of their lives. Even those of us for whom the result turned out to be a supremely happy one, will always suffer some sort of post-traumatic stress disorder.
We will continue to be haunted by dangerous visions of that moment as the ball came to Gudjohnsen, and he was about to score the winner for Chelsea with the last kick of the game, for sure. Watching it on Sky Sports, Liverpool's former captain Phil Thompson let out a terrible bark of pain, as if he had been stabbed. At Anfield, a friend of mine slumped onto the next row of seats, devastated by a searing vision of the terrible torment that was to come.
And as the world started again, as Gudjohnsen 'pulled the trigger', astonishingly, the ball flashed across the six-yard box and through a gap between Carragher of Liverpool and Drogba of Chelsea, and out across the end-line.
How big was this gap? Well, you know the eye of the needle that Roman Abramovich has to go through to get to heaven? It wasn't nearly as big as that. Carragher, the greatness of whose performance on the night was also quantifiable by any normal measurement, might so easily have been the unwitting agent of his team's destruction, the blameless facilitator of Evil. But the ball flew past him and all those desperate men, somehow.
JUST as the event is too big, so the margin is too small. As John Riise of Liverpool put it, quite reasonably, if the ball had gone in, he would have given up football, and then he would have killed himself. And even the most rational beings find themselves plunged into strange little troughs of depression at the thought of how they could possibly have coped, if Gudjohnsen had scored.
So these people are saddened by something that never actually happened. So much for their science and their philosophy.
And as for Chelsea's vanquished Jose Mourinho - he had at last encountered a Power greater than Himself.
