“A minute after the game, we could say a thousand barbaric things,” Vicente Iborra said, but none of them could ever express it as well as the look on his face as he stood there on the touchline trying to work out what had just happened and how. Behind him, Leo Messi hugged Santi Cazorla and, watching it, you kind of wished you could hug them too. “Peculiar,” Sergio Asenjo called it. “Mad,” Ernesto Valverde offered. “We’ve stabbed ourselves,” Iborra added. “Football’s given us quite a beating,” Javier Calleja said. Which was true, six points in three days somehow becoming just one, salvation denied, but it had given everyone else quite a night: something wild and wonderful, a 4-4 draw that was as exhausting as it was exhilarating.

Calleja scored the last time Villarreal and Barcelona drew 4-4 here, Patrick Kluivert getting a 90th-minute equaliser to come back from 3-0 and 4-3 down, back in April 2001. But even that wasn’t quite like this, the man who is now Villarreal’s manager, re-signed to rescue them 49 days after he was sacked, barely able to believe what he was watching unfold before him. “A point against Barcelona isn’t bad, but …” he shrugged. But they were this close to it being more, one player admitting that he felt “sunk”, the team heading towards the second division. And yet, it felt as if the point wasn’t really the point. Instead, there was something simpler, more primitive.

As the front cover of Marca put it this morning: “Football is incredible.”

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Sometimes it’s not of course but sometimes, somehow football finds a way. And on Tuesday night, it certainly was. Beyond the results, beyond the consequences, beyond the calculations and the points, there’s the game, and that’s what remains. It’s not so much what happened that you remember as what you felt, and by the end of Villarreal-Barcelona you had felt it all, accelerating through emotions.

“It was a mad game. We could have won easily, they could have won easily. And then …” said Valverde. He was almost laughing as he said so, and that became a recurring theme. Sentences went unfinished and the word used most seemed to be pffff. In AS, the novelist and poet Juan Cruz came up with three words and none were as good: unjust, joyous, implausible. Guillermo Amor played for Villarreal in 2001 too; now he’s a director at Barcelona, the man whose job it is to find the right words after every game. Here, he smiled, looked a little lost, and then said: “It had everything.”

It had eight goals, 19 shots on target, a post, a bar, 26 dribbles, and exactly 1,000 passes, Arturo Vidal completing more of them anyone else. It had great saves, brilliant goals and bizarre ones. It didn’t have Gerard Piqué, sitting out for the first time all season to devastating effect, or much in the way of defending until Ramiro Funes Mori suddenly, unexpectedly, stood up in the second half. But it did have Samu Chukwueze, so fast everyone else was going backwards. Malcom, scoring one and providing another in 15 almost unfathomably good minutes, El Periódico likening him to Colin McGlashan, the Scottish striker who famously got concussed during one Partick Thistle game and didn’t know who he was, prompting his coach John Lambie to tell the physio: “Great, tell him he’s Pelé and send him back out there.” And Luis Suárez, a baffling combination of everything.

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It had Santiago Cazorla González, ladies and gentlemen. He created eight – yes, eight – clear opportunities. And it also had Messi. It wasn’t supposed to, but it did. Rested, ready for Atlético at the weekend, he was eventually called from the bench. “He could have stayed there,” Calleja grumbled, tongue only slightly wedged in his cheek. He could, and Villarreal might have got a victory that would have been huge, giving them room to breathe, some space between them and relegation, and some comfort after they lost a two-goal lead at Celta on Saturday. But then it wouldn’t have had the ending it had.

Villarreal could have had two inside seven minutes, Marc-André ter Stegen making two superb stops. Instead, Barcelona had two inside 15, Philippe Coutinho scoring the first, Malcom getting the second. Coutinho then hit the post and another good chance was passed up. Barcelona, superb to start with, were cutting through the worst defence since some bright spark at Troy decided a wooden horse would look great in the living room. But then it was 2-1 and almost 2-2 and a different game. Samu scored the first and then watched Ter Stegen stop him again. It wasn’t even half-time yet.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Santi Cazorla was at his brilliant best against Messi and Barcelona. Photograph: José Jordan/AFP/Getty Images

Four minutes into the second half, Toto Ekambi was sent away up the right. Ter Stegen stepped out to meet the cross, watching a yellow shirt dash into the six-yard box in front him, but Ekambi didn’t cross. Instead, he stuck it straight in at the near post, a sensational shot that caught them all by surprise. Still they came, Barcelona falling apart, Sergio Busquets alone and overrun, Samuel Umtiti looking like a player who had only started eight times all season. Messi was sent on but it didn’t get better; it might even have got worse for a while. The same went for Ivan Rakitic. Iborra made it 3-2 after an hour, then Cazorla sent Carlos Bacca running through, the footballer who once sold fish going round Ter Stegen to finish. For the first time since 1949, a team had trailed by two against Barcelona and now led by two. “We’d done the hardest part,” Calleja said. “We produced a great performance; I take my hat off to them.”

Barcelona, on the other hand, hadn’t. They’d been “ridiculed”, as one paper put it, on the verge of being defeated 18 games later, and heavily too. It seemed like there might be a title race after all: lose and with seven games left Barcelona would be seven points ahead of Atlético, who go to the Camp Nou on Saturday. But then, El País, said: “Barcelona don’t lose, even when they try to.” Or as Suárez insisted: “We have to be aware that we got it wrong but we showed spirit and that we want this league.” Villarreal had rebelled and clung to survival against the hardest opponent of all, about to beat the league leaders. “We saw everything painted black,” Asenjo said, “then we turned it around … and then …” Time had ticked away until it was almost gone, and then it happened.

“Incredible!” screamed the front of Sport. “Madness,” said El Mundo Deportivo. “Total madness,” said Marca, taking it a little further. “Barcelona, resuscitated,” ran the headline above Santi Gimenez’s piece in AS, but not before he sent out an SOS. “Time to stick another match report up your bum mode,” he lamented.

In the 86th minute, Álvaro was sent off. In the 90th, Messi was brought down on the edge of area. The clock showed 89.49 when he struck an absurd rocket of a free-kick in off the post,. “It’s a fraction of a second,” Asenjo said; “Messi was precise …” Valverde said: “… Pffff, very, very precise.” The photo of them watching the ball passing the wall was like some Renaissance painting you could spend hours looking at, forever finding new elements.

Fermín de la Calle🏉 (@FermindelaCalle) Tremenda la foto de 📷 Pep Morata en el lanzamiento de falta de Messi pic.twitter.com/3cnJMxvwqt

Three minutes were added, because three minutes are always added, even when you wish it would never end. With the clock showing 92.55 and Ter Stegen up for a corner, the ball came to Suárez, who hit it back again, on the bounce, whizzing through and into the net.

ITV Football (@itvfootball) Highlights: An eight-goal thriller for you to enjoy



Watch back the best of the action as Suarez snatches late draw for Barcelonahttps://t.co/5f8Kl4Koql#VillarrealBarça #LaLigaSantander pic.twitter.com/w8myW7ikfw

And then, right then, the referee did something terrible: he blew the final whistle and brought the fun to an end.