Barcelona’s players paraded through the streets and avenues of their city on Sunday on a familiar ride, with a regular passenger on their open-topped bus.
The European Cup will be 60 years old next year and the fact it has spent almost half of its sixth decade in the capital of Catalonia is a matter of great regional pride.
The immediate challenge for any European club winners is the tantalising one of whether they can we keep it for more than 12 months.
No holder of the Uefa Champions League, as the competition was rebranded in 1992, has ever retained it.
Barcelona, whose status as the most dominant club in the competition over the past decade was confirmed by their 3-1 win over Juventus in Saturday's Berlin final, will aspire to breaking that jinx.
They have other targets, too, one of them set by Gerard Pique, the defender who shone against Juventus and capped a fine season personally.
Pique was celebrating both a hat-trick of European Cups and nine months when his reputation as one of the finest players in his position in his sport was redeemed, a reputation that had been damaged through 2013 and 2014.
“We need to match the six trophies we won in one year under Pep Guardiola,” Pique urged his teammates.
In 2009, as in 2015, Barca won the treble of Primera Liga, Copa del Rey and Champions League. They then picked up all the supplementary trophies: Spanish Super Cup, European Super Cup and Club World Cup. Those three are the immediate new target.
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They will be invited to contest the first two in August, not long after Lionel Messi, Neymar and Javier Mascherano have completed their duties in the Copa America, which starts this week.
One hazard on the horizon is fatigue to key players and Barcelona’s coaching staff will be wary as they attempt to consolidate their place at the game’s summit.
By December, and their assault of the Club World Cup, they will have a clearer idea of how strong will be the competition for their main domestic title, notably from a Real Madrid under a new coach, Rafa Benitez.
Barca are also entering peculiar territory as an institution.
It is an assumption among modern super clubs that every pre-season needs to be a springboard, a time to raise standards, and no more so than when success has been achieved.
After winning the 2009 Champions League, Barcelona bought Zlatan Ibrahimovic for more than €60 million (Dh244.9m); after their 2011 triumph, they signed Alexis Sanchez.
This summer they can hire nobody from outside the club, because of a Fifa transfer ban, imposed because of irregularities in the club’s past recruitment of players under 18 and which expires only in 2016.
There were few sour notes struck in the aftermath of a glorious final in Berlin and high praise generously offered for both teams involved.
But there was no sign either of Dani Alves’s softening in his determination to reject the contract offer made to him by Barca.
He is a free agent now and apparently pleased to dictate his terms to several suitors.
Alves’s mastery of his advanced right-back role, his terrific on-field empathy with Lionel Messi, developed over seven years, would be hard for Barcelona to replace, even if they can bring in the excellent Sevilla right-sided player Aleix Vidal, as they are planning, once they can make transfers again, from January.
The future of Luis Enrique, the coach who in his first season with Barca overcame tactical confusions and some confrontations in the dressing room to win a treble, the first club to do so twice, is also clouded. He would not commit definitely to staying when he spoke in Berlin.
Some of his caution is based on the institutional concerns, such as the transfer embargo and this year’s presidential elections.
As Enrique accepted the applause of the city and its loyalists on Thursday, he had half a mind on what might be a tricky six months ahead at a club where the demands for success never ease and the politics can be perplexing.
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