After that, Buffon was desperate for the game to start; too desperate in fact. On November 19, 1995, the Parma team photo - for the first and still only time in the club's history - did not feature a goalkeeper. Quite simply, Buffon was unfamiliar with the practice. He had come straight from the Primavera, where they didn't partake in team photos before kick-off. So, once the handshakes were out of the way, and the captains had decided who would kick off and which sides their respective teams would take, Buffon simply ran straight towards his penalty area. On the old footage from RAI 3, it’s still possible to see Parma’s players trying to call him back for the photo but by then, it was too late.

Buffon had already taken up position in goal and how Milan wish he hadn't.

The 17-year-old debutant in the Parma net may have made a rookie mistake before the game had even begun but he was flawless from the first whistle to last, making one incredible save after another – most notably from Baggio, Weah and Zvonimir Boban.

As Scala recalls to Goal, "Gigi went out and performed miracles that day."

They were the first of many by the man who would later be ordained ‘San Gigi’.

After he had saved a penalty from the great Ronaldo in a Serie A clash with Inter in 1997, grateful Parma fans even presented their new hero with a 'Superman' t-shirt, the very one in which he celebrated the club's Coppa Italia triumph two years later. The analogy appeared apt. A boy of rare size and strength developing into a hero capable of seemingly superhuman feats of athleticism. Furthermore, even when he made mistakes, the comparison worked. Indeed, when Buffon was written off by some critics as past his best due to a couple of high-profile errors for club and country in 2016, Juventus fans responded by unfurling a banner before his next outing, against Udinese. "Even Superman is sometimes only Clark Kent," it read, "Gigi, always our superhero."

Gigi never felt like one, though. Despite all of the fame, he never forgot where had come from, or what his parents had taught him. "Sport was always such an important thing for us not just because of the advantage of physical activity,” Maria explains. “We felt it was a way of teaching the kids how to interact with others, how to lose, how to suffer. And Gigi certainly suffered. He’s been very fortunate but he had many bad defeats, bad injuries. "At the 2010 World Cup, he rang us from South Africa with his mobile on the bed on speakerphone because his back was so bad that he couldn't even hold it; he couldn’t even move.

"So, sport, like life, can teach you how to suffer, how to overcome obstacles. It also keeps you humble. Despite everything, he never changed.

"Even after his debut, we didn’t see Gigi right after the Milan game because we had to get in the car and go to see Veronica play a volleyball match nearby. "When we got there, we received so many compliments: ‘Your son is incredible!’ and this and that. They compared him to Lev Yashin. I didn't even know who Yashin was! "But when we went back to Parma to collect Gigi, he was calm. That night on the TV they were talking about this ‘baby Buffon’ but he was still the same Gigi to us.

“The following morning, we went out to get the papers. When we came back, Gigi was on the phone and he shushed us. I said, 'Why are you telling us to keep quiet?' And he replied, 'Because I'm live on TV!'