Pep Guardiola had called for an atmosphere but he did not expect there to be total, utter silence. That was the most eerie thing inside the stadium in this most incredible and almost unreal of Champions League ties as Tottenham Hotspur knocked out Manchester City on away goals.

That bare fact does not tell the story. How could it? It does not tell the story of five goals in an 11-minute first-half frenzy, of City, at one point needing three goals to progress, and achieving just that, before facing an exit, and the extraordinary scenes when Raheem Sterling thought he had then completed a hat-trick deep into injury time to send City through only for it to be ruled out after the Italian VAR Massilmiliano Irati asked the Turkish referee Cuneyt Cakir to review.

The dream of the quadruple is over for City and as the wild celebrations were brought to an abrupt halt – Sergio Aguero was clearly offside before he set up Sterling – they were replaced by, well, that silence. It was stunned, complete silence apart from, after a pause, a delirious wedge of Spurs supporters. City’s fans simply did not know how to react, how could they, before the fifth minute of added time expired and it was over.

It was not their fault. They backed their team and the atmosphere before that incident was brilliant and it could not fail to be with such an endlessly end-to-end game that no neutral wanted to end. But they were numb as they downed a sea of flags on their seats before departing.

What was possibly the most stunning fact of all, though, was that Kevin De Bruyne, who was unstoppable, somehow ended up on the losing side.