It was the equanimity with which Jurgen Klopp faced the critical situation: that's what the Liverpool players wanted to talk about as they wandered across the Anfield turf towards their cars late on Thursday night - dawdling, some of them, as if they knew the spirit which they had discovered on that surface might be a once-in-a-lifetime thing.
“It would have been easy for him to come in effing and blinding but he didn't,” James Milner said of the scene which confronted their manager at half-time. “Calm. Surprisingly calm. No panic. No stress,” added Divock Origi, and their narrative was so consistent and considered that you knew it went way beyond the usual platitudes.
Liverpool's American owners signed Klopp for the good times, not crisis management, yet a look into the depths of his philosophy would have told them that he was the man you wanted for that 8.50pm dressing room moment against Borussia Dortmund. He's unusually - almost perversely -interested in crisis, difficulty, and what happens when you are staggering around in the forest. That equilibrium we were hearing about conforms to his very consistent pattern of behaviour for handling it.
The author and journalist Raphael Honigstein related in a revealing recent analysis of Klopp for Red Bulletin how the manager once recounted a conversation he'd had with a bobsleigher.
The guy had told him that you must not over-steer as you try to find the perfect line on the track. “Don't always get actively involved. Sometimes, when the time is right, let things take their own course?” This advice helped when Klopp once caught a member of his Dortmund team with a large bottle of vodka on the table, one New Year's Eve. He smiled at him, told him to enjoy his evening and proceeded as if nothing had happened. Most managers take radical action in a crisis, Honigstein observed, yet Klopp often does not. When his own Borussia Dortmund side were struggling halfway through the 2014/15 season and had reached their winter training camp, he maintained excellent spirits - outwardly at least.
Sometimes he just says nothing. During Dortmund's 2010 German Cup campaign, he would show players images of earlier finals in the competition, yet without uttering so much as a word. No substitutes until past the hour mark on Thursday night. “Anyone can have a good day,” he has said. “But you have to be able to perform on a bad day. That's what you live for as a sportsman. You have to put up a fight.”
Of course, the sangfroid can only really work if you have the players with you and it is that capacity to forge a bond which underpinned an Anfield comeback which, with three goals required and 33 minutes to find them, must eclipse Olympiakos 2004 and Saint Etienne 1977.
The little psychological touches help him along the way. Klopp deconstructed Bill Shankly late on Thursday night with his revelation that he had told the players not to touch the 'This is Anfield' sign until they had won something. “It''s a sign of respect,” he said. For Shankly, in whose era the sign first appeared, it's more functional purpose was to put the fear of God in the other lot.
Honigstein reveals that Klopp never jots down what he's going to say in advance because spontaneity is one of his most important weapons. For him, the brief and rightly measured message can allow individuals to take positives from a situation in which they had only discerned negativity: 'reframing' as the psychologists call it. Hence his evocation in Thursday's dressing room of “a certain night in Istanbul”, as Milner told it later. '0-2 is a portentous deficit. Embrace it,' he seemed to be telling them. It's one thing to do that; another entirely to make the words stick.
They did so because of his magnetism and his magnetic interest in them as individuals - a quality which, it should be said, made many love the bones of Brendan Rodgers in the years before he went out of fashion. But what divides Klopp from Rodgers is the muscularity of a socialist ethos which ensured that Liverpool, a team in which only Philippe Coutinho could now be called a superstar, were better than the sum of the parts against the Germans. In years gone by, it would have been Steven Gerrard hauling them out of an abyss like that but Klopp's collectivism works well for the beginnings of life without the talisman. Four goals, four goalscorers, two of them defenders: that said a lot about Anfield's Dortmund spectacular.
One of the reasons why Klopp idolised Karlheinz Forster, the Vfb Stuttgart and German international defender, while growing up was that he made up for in attitude what he might have lacked in natural talent. Defeating a superior side through work ethic and collectivism is, for him, a greater achievement than overcoming one by technical superiority. Klopp identified Dortmund as one of the world's top five sides before the Europa League quarterfinal and Liverpool are certainly not in that bracket. But they could bring their betters down to their level.
For the collective to work, of course, it requires individuals who cohere, not individualists - which is another very Liverpool philosophy. “It's not a case of finding the best 11 players, but rather the 11 that are most likely to win,” Klopp once said - an observation strikingly similar to the words of Manchester United's Louis van Gaal, a less magnetic personality who has said: “I don''t need the 11 best. I need the best 11.”
If Klopp remains the manager for a generation, there will come a time when Liverpool expect to be delivering more than bloody noses, though Milner observed that nights like Thursday can foster a belief for the age, and that will do nicely just for now. Milner says he knew the back end of Manchester City's 26-year quest for silverware, then saw the sweet fresh air issue through the club when it won the 2011 FA Cup. City haven't looked back.
Liverpool look forwards, to the semi-final with Villarreal, a side 16 points off the top of La Liga, which gives no cause for fear. “In football, there''s no secret,” Origi said. “You just have to play with your whole heart and give everything. A lot of teams have qualities but when you have a good manager who is tactically strong?. At half-time he told us we just had to do everything to make it a special evening. Something to tell our children and grandchildren.”
It would have been easy for him to come in effing and blinding but he didn't. Calm. Surprisingly calm. No panic. No stress – The Independent