[Live coverage and analysis of the Champions League final here.]

ESTEPONA, Spain — Some Liverpool players found it was in the evening when their minds tended to wander. It was then, once the children were in bed or training was done, that their thoughts would drift to the Champions League: back to Kiev, forward to Madrid, lingering on what might have been, and what could yet be.

Others were caught when they were most vulnerable: as they went to sleep, or as they woke up, those moments either side of consciousness, when you cannot help yourself. For them, as one member of Jürgen Klopp’s squad put it, Saturday’s final against Tottenham has been “the last thing you think about at night and the first thing you think about in the morning.”

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Some chased the thoughts away, dismissing them as a waste of energy, a drain on the nerves. Others confronted them, imagining what victory would feel like, remembering how defeat tasted a year ago.

And some, like Klopp, embraced it all. Between Liverpool’s last game of the Premier League campaign and its final appointment of the season this weekend, he gave his players a few days off. He told them to take the chance to unwind, to rest their legs and relax their minds, but he did not afford himself the same privilege.