Lionel Messi said goodbye to the Argentine national team in Buenos Aires the night of Oct. 6 the way that he did most things in the blue-and-white shirt for 21 years: by setting up two goals and scoring a third in a 3-0 friendly win over Benin.

Having let his feet do the talking for 90 minutes, he then picked up a microphone and made his way to the center circle of the Estadio Monumental to address the 85,000 people who were hoarse from chanting his name. He spoke for several minutes, about his late father, his teammates, and the honor of representing his nation. “I am proud to be Argentine,” he declared.

Lionel Messi said goodbye to the Argentine national team in Buenos Aires the night of Oct. 6 the way that he did most things in the blue-and-white shirt for 21 years: by setting up two goals and scoring a third in a 3-0 friendly win over Benin.

Having let his feet do the talking for 90 minutes, he then picked up a microphone and made his way to the center circle of the Estadio Monumental to address the 85,000 people who were hoarse from chanting his name. He spoke for several minutes, about his late father, his teammates, and the honor of representing his nation. “I am proud to be Argentine,” he declared.

Hering that from anyone else, I would have dismissed that as a cliché and moved on. But coming from Messi, it gave me pause and took me back. He had said almost exactly the same thing to me in Barcelona, Spain, in January 2012, and it had sounded very different then. He was answering the charge, common in Argentina at the time, that the boy who had moved to Spain at 13 was a Spaniard at heart—and that this was why he could never perform the same miracles for the national team that he did for FC Barcelona.

Six months before we met, after a goalless draw in the Argentine province where he was born, the crowd had chanted “Mercenary! Catalonian!” at Messi. Now, I was interviewing him for a Time magazine cover story, and he had spent most of our conversation gripping the bottom of his chair with both........

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