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TSN Soccer Analyst

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They are visions seen with our own eyes and secured in our minds.

They are treasured snapshots of history that need to be remembered so they can be told over and over again.

They are powerful, personal moments that only you should be able to describe in the words that come to you.

Sometimes a football fan can wait a long time to see such true iconic visions of greatness, yet when it appears, it is a truly ravishing site on show in all its glory across the world for all to drool over.

It is these moments that require football fans everywhere to always leave a little bit extra when analyzing players. Many a performance has been described as incredible, unbelievable or absolutely world class. Yet when you truly see one of them, it makes a mockery of the many gone by that never really hit that standard.

Such people can be forgiven for such hyperbole, after all time spent between truly unbelievable individual performances on the biggest of stages can lead to slight errors of judgment.

For some, though, living on the cautious side of hyperbole is a more comfortable place; never wanting to cross a line or compare with greats of the past. This group met an incredible challenge on Wednesday.

The world was swallowed up in hype this past week around a money-making boxing match that served up all that can be wrong about sport in 2015, leaving bad tastes across the planet.

Thankfully four days after the Las Vegas fiasco, the world's most popular sport needed no hype to get people excited about a Champions League match between two genuine giants, Barcelona and Bayern Munich.

There was no torturous undercard, no loudmouthed press conference and no sales pitch to get people interested.

It was football at its purest, most innocent form where genuine moments of real quality got people talking.

It was on a field featuring 22 of the finest players in the game, surrounded by over 95,000 supporters, inside the picturesque theatre of the Camp Nou, that arguably the finest footballer to play the game delivered a simply sensational individual performance.

Lionel Messi will be remembered for many things once his career is over. It is one of few things he cannot control and one of the few things about him that we can.

Only we can decide what to do with the wonderful images he paints in our minds - ones that will eventually live much longer than any of us - but future generations will thank us much more for these images than any stats we can throw next to his name.

It was a night where he - again - became the all-time leader in goals scored in the Champions League but that was about as irrelevant as the position Jerome Boateng stood in as the Argentine glided around him on his way to making it 2-0.

The move to position himself for the finish was only part of the plan put in place by the genius who then went on to chip the world's greatest goalkeeper, Manuel Neuer.

The footballing world could only stand up and applaud with smiles on their faces. It was one thing to witness something so remarkable, it was another to see it done against the best the game can offer in its most competitive competition.

This was no game against Cordoba or Eibar.

This was a European Cup semifinal against a side that was slightly favoured to progress over Messi's Barcelona. A team expected to kick on in Pep Guardiola's second season and become champions of Europe. With one more leg to play, that remains possible, of course, but Messi's performance showed just how fragile a legacy can be.

There are few who could argue that Guardiola is the world's finest coach and he went to Germany, above everything else, to win the Champions League with that team with his principals.

On Wednesday, his team went from 0-0 to 0-3 in 17 blistering final minutes. From a position of strength heading home to a side on their knees looking up to talents on display by Messi.

It was the kind of performance only one man in this sport currently can offer.

Guardiola, who earlier this season had smiled like a fan when watching Messi torture Man City in this same competition, called him 'unstoppable' this week. He'd know.

"He is a player from another dimension," said Barcelona boss Luis Enrique post match.

Enrique stopped short of calling it his greatest game as coach knowing that could soon be on its way but in Messi, he has inherited a player who may well be playing even better than what he did in the final years of Guardiola.

Messi admitted he had fallen short in 2014 but he hadn't come close to this sensational form for more than a year. Some wondered if the heights he had reached could ever be climbed again.

They will never enjoy being so wrong.

When he was exhausted at the World Cup and carried a team of injured stars and average internationals - Javier Mascherano aside - some mocked when he was unable to lift the World Cup himself.

They took shots at him, saying he could never be the best without winning an international competition that happens once every four years in a season that follows an exhaustive domestic campaign with teammates who wouldn't get on Barcelona's bench. What a pity but that is their loss.

Football has moved on since Diego Maradona was able to carry a side to glory almost thirty years ago and for that, we should all be thankful.

Messi is not just the kind of player you will tell your grandchildren about, he is the kind you absolutely need to tell those who only watch one tournament every four years.

We should not be afraid to raise the hype around him because, wonderfully, he will never do so himself. He is without question one of the greatest ever and performances like this one against Bayern need to be treasured, remembered and used as a barometer for all seeking displays of true greatness going forward.