The moment belonged to Kai Havertz. With just a minute or so remaining at Bayer Leverkusen’s BayArena on Sunday afternoon, Havertz, a teenage midfielder, and the home team were losing to Wolfsburg. Mario Gomez, the visitors’ slick-haired, evergreen forward, had scored a quick-fire hat trick to overturn Leverkusen’s two-goal lead.

Then, as the game ticked into its dying seconds, Karim Bellarabi lofted a pass into Havertz’s path. Havertz adjusted his stride, just a little, and caught the ball as it bounced with the outside of his left foot. His shot scudded past the Wolfsburg goalkeeper and into the bottom corner, salvaging a 3-3 tie.

As he ran to the crowd to exult in the first goal of his senior career, Havertz was not the only one celebrating. In the Bundesliga’s marketing department, too, there would have been no little joy. That one moment, after all, was the perfect microcosm of how the competition likes to see itself: a fresh-faced, GIF-friendly distillation of modern German soccer’s vibrant self-image.

When the Bundesliga published its annual review in January, the league’s chief executive, Christian Seifert, wanted to draw attention to three areas in particular. The Bundesliga boasts, he said, the youngest average age of any of Europe’s major leagues. It has, he continued, the highest attendances of any soccer league in the world, behind only the N.F.L. in all sports. And those fans who swell its stadiums, he concluded, see more goals than their counterparts in Spain, Italy, England and France, and have done so for “the last 26 years.”