Diego Armando Maradona's last dance with Toronto Italia

It was September 2, 1996 when Diego Armando Maradona played what everyone thought was his last football match at Birchmount Stadium in Scarborough, a suburb of Toronto. Not the shirt of Boca, Napoli, Barça or Newell's Old Boys, but that of Toronto Italia, a semi-professional team of the Canadian National Soccer League (CNSL) formed mostly by Italian immigrants for which Raúl played - for all Lalo - younger brother of the Pibe de Oro.

In the videos recovered, digitized and published by COPA90 (directed by Adrijan Assoufi) there is all the excitement of those who are about to play a friendly match with the best player of all time in a packed stadium with just 6,000 seats. but above all the emotions of president Pasquale Fioccola and mister Peter Pinizzotto stand out.

On a pitch that still showed football and not soccer lines, Maradona gave the possibility to an entire community to live a true dream. The result of the match (2-1 for Toronto Italy) matters little, because what remains in the legend is the winning goal signed by Diego directly from a corner kick, making space in the crowd for a long run-up. It was not a simple show, it was a real match and the memory of Fioccola - who hugged Diego a hundred times that evening - and of his opponents is the testimony of how cross the Maradona icon was.

Those 6,000 people - who look much more from the videos - witnessed the latest dribbles of a player who involved the masses wherever he went, wherever he performed. The stories that COPA90 told is one of the most incredible ever, revealed by Pablo Iglesias Maurer of The Athletic.