Three weeks.
The Bundesliga had four matches remaining. The Champions League second leg sat at the end of it all like a door that the entire season had been walking toward.
Schmidt managed both things with the specific efficiency of a man who refused to allow one to diminish the other. The league was the league. Every point mattered. The table was still alive — second place Dortmund's to lose, third place comfortable enough, but comfortable enough was not the same as confirmed.
The squad understood this. Nobody needed to be told twice.
Monday's session after Munich was recovery — light technical work, nothing taxing, bodies that had given ninety minutes at the Allianz Arena being allowed to find themselves again before the next demand arrived.
Richard ran through the session easily and spent the afternoon at home with his tactical notebook and the Bayern film that the analysis team had sent through by midday.
He watched the full ninety minutes once.
Then specific sequences three times each.
Kane's movement when dropping deep — the angles he chose, the way he pulled Schlotterbeck fractionally out of position each time, the half-second of space that created for the runners arriving in behind him.
Musiala's press triggers — when he committed, when he held, the pattern in his decision-making that Can had read correctly four times in the match and incorrectly twice.
Davies' recovery runs — when he tracked back and when he didn't, the specific situations in which his attacking instinct overrode his defensive responsibility and the channel stayed open long enough to be dangerous.
He closed the laptop.
Wrote three things in the notebook.
Then made dinner and called his mother.
She answered immediately.
"You ate?" she said, before anything else.
"I'm eating now," he said.
"Properly? Not that — what do you call it — the delivery food?"
"Properly. I cooked."
A pause in which she clearly assessed the likelihood of this. "What did you cook?"
"Rice. And chicken."
"How?"
"In a pan."
"Richard."
"It was fine, Mum."
She made a sound that covered several positions simultaneously — skepticism, amusement, the specific maternal combination of knowing her child was lying slightly and deciding it wasn't worth the battle tonight. "The match," she said.
"Two-two."
"I watched." A pause. "That man Kane is very good."
"He's the best striker in the world right now."
"He hit the post."
"He did."
"God saved you," she said simply.
Richard smiled at his food. "Kobel saved us."
"God working through Kobel," she said, with the confidence of someone who had resolved this theological question satisfactorily. "Three weeks for the second leg?"
"Three weeks."
"I'm coming," she said.
Richard looked up from his food. "To Dortmund?"
"To Dortmund. Your father too. We want to be there." A pause, the briefest softening in her voice. "We want to see it. In person. Not on a screen."
Richard sat with that for a moment.
His parents. At Signal Iduna Park. For the Champions League quarterfinal second leg.
"I'll sort the tickets," he said.
"Evan already called your father," she said. "It's being arranged."
Of course it was.
"Okay," Richard said.
"Okay," she said. "Now finish your rice."
The first Bundesliga match of the final run was Werder Bremen at home.
A match that the table required and that Schmidt treated with the identical seriousness he brought to everything — full preparation, full intensity in the sessions building toward it, no concession to the European fixture three weeks away.
Dortmund won 3-1.
Guirassy scored twice — his twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth of the season, the second a header from Richard's cross that arrived at exactly the height and pace Guirassy's run demanded. Twenty-six league goals. Still four behind Kane at the top of the scoring chart but the gap had been twelve in January and was now four and the table acknowledged the movement without resolving it.
Richard scored the third on sixty-eight minutes — a combination with Brandt that had become so familiar the stadium recognized it before it completed, a short exchange in the half-space that ended with Richard driving into the box and finishing low across the goalkeeper. His thirteenth Bundesliga goal of the season.
Brandt's assist took his league tally to eighteen. Still top of the charts. Richard's thirteen assists left him five behind with four matches remaining — a gap that was real but not impossible, which he noted without making it the point.
In the dressing room afterward Schmidt said: "Good. Three points. Next."
That was all.
Wednesday brought Ella to the door with a problem.
Richard opened it to find her holding a flat-pack furniture box that was slightly taller than she was, a look of determined optimism on her face that did not fully conceal the physical reality of the situation.
"I need help," she said.
"I can see that."
"It's a bookshelf. The instructions are in German and Swedish simultaneously and neither version makes any sense."
Richard looked at the box. Then at her. "You bought a Swedish bookshelf in Germany."
"It was on sale."
He took the other end of the box.
They carried it into her living room — which had the green sofa he had recommended, he noticed, and it looked correct — and spent forty-five minutes assembling a bookshelf that the instructions suggested should take twenty minutes, the discrepancy explained by three pieces that the instructions claimed were interchangeable and were not.
Ella talked throughout. About her German class, which had progressed to the point where she could hold a basic conversation at the bakery — Helga had apparently given her a pastry as encouragement, which Ella considered a significant professional achievement. About a colleague at her job who had started watching Dortmund matches because of Richard, which she relayed with the specific pride of someone taking partial credit.
"He didn't know anything about football in September," she said, handing Richard a bolt. "Now he has opinions about the offside trap."
"That's either good or terrible," Richard said.
"Genuinely unclear," Ella agreed.
The bookshelf was completed at the third attempt and stood level, which Richard considered a minor triumph given the instructions.
Ella stood back and looked at it with satisfaction.
"You're quite good at that," she said.
"I bought furniture for a whole house in January."
"True." She looked at him. "How are you? Actually."
The question was simple and direct in the way Ella's questions always were — no preamble, no softening, just the thing itself.
Richard thought about it properly.
"Ready," he said. "For all of it."
She studied him for a moment with the expression of someone who had known him for four months and had learned to read the difference between what he said and what he meant.
"Good," she said. She seemed satisfied with the answer. "Your parents are coming for the match."
"You know about that?"
"Krause told me. Evan called him to arrange the neighborhood tickets." She smiled. "Krause has been very calm about it. Which means he is extremely excited."
Richard looked at the bookshelf.
"I'll come for coffee before the match," he said. "All of us."
Ella looked at him for a moment.
"He would love that," she said quietly. "He really would."
The second Bundesliga match was Stuttgart away.
A harder fixture — Stuttgart had steadied in the final weeks and were playing with the freedom of a team that had secured their position and had nothing to lose. They pressed high, committed bodies forward, and for sixty minutes made Dortmund's build-up genuinely difficult.
Jobe scored the only goal — a driven finish from the edge of the box after a combination with Sabitzer that split Stuttgart's midfield press, low and precise into the bottom corner, his fourth goal of the season. The celebration was brief and warm — Jobe pointing at Sabitzer first, then at Richard who had drawn the press that created the space, the acknowledgment of a goal that had required three people to produce.
One-nil. Three more points.
Second place confirmed with two matches remaining.
In the away dressing room Schmidt said: "Second place. Good." A pause. "Bayern in nine days. Signal Iduna Park."
The room understood the shift. The league had delivered what it needed to deliver. Europe was next.
Thursday was the beginning of the final Bayern preparation phase.
Schmidt introduced the second leg shape in the morning session — not a complete reveal, a first layer. The way he always built things. One piece at a time, each session adding to the picture without ever showing it all at once until the moment the full picture was needed.
Richard felt the shape from the first sequence.
It was different to the first leg shape. Not dramatically — subtly, the positioning of three players adjusted by small amounts that individually meant little and collectively meant everything. Guirassy slightly deeper in his starting position. Brandt wider on the right. Richard given a specific instruction about his movement in the first fifteen minutes — not the channel run, something different, a movement designed to pull Kimmich out of his natural position before the channel run happened.
A setup. Then the execution.
He ran it four times in the session.
By the fourth time it felt natural.
Friday evening his parents arrived.
Chidi collected them from Düsseldorf airport — Richard had offered to go himself and Chidi had looked at him with the expression of a man who had considered this and made a better decision on his behalf. "You stay. I'll get them. You being at the airport will cause a thing."
He was right. Three people had asked Richard for photographs at the supermarket that week alone.
Richard was at the house when the car pulled up.
His mother came through the gate first.
She looked at the house for a moment — the garden, the front door, the windows, the whole structure of it — with the expression of someone seeing something they had imagined many times and finding the reality both exactly right and more than they had imagined simultaneously.
Then she looked at him.
She did not say anything immediately.
She crossed the garden in four steps and held him for a long time without speaking.
His father came through the gate behind her. Looked at the house with the assessing eye of a man who noticed structural details before emotional ones. Nodded once, apparently satisfied.
Then looked at Richard over his wife's shoulder.
"Good house," he said.
Richard laughed into his mother's shoulder.
"Come inside," he said. "I'll make tea."
His mother pulled back and looked at him properly — at his face, his height, the whole of him, the way parents looked at children they hadn't seen in months and were recalibrating the image they carried internally against the person standing in front of them.
"You've grown," she said.
"Mum."
"You have." She touched his face briefly. Then composed herself. "Tea. Yes. Show me the kitchen."
He showed her the kitchen.
She immediately identified three things that could be improved and said so directly and warmly and without any expectation that he would actually change them, which was correct.
His father sat at the kitchen table with his tea and looked at the tactical notebook on the counter and the Bayern analysis documents beside it and said nothing.
After a moment: "You prepare properly."
"Schmidt prepares properly," Richard said. "I follow."
His father looked at him. "Both things can be true."
They drank their tea.
Outside Dortmund was yellow and black and nine days from something enormous and Richard sat at his kitchen table with his parents and felt, for the first time since January, completely at home in every sense that mattered.
Saturday Richard took his parents to Krause's for coffee.
He had mentioned it to Krause the previous evening — a brief conversation over the fence, Krause in his garden in his scarf, Richard explaining that his parents were in Dortmund for the week and he had promised to bring them.
Krause had said: "Ten o'clock. I'll make proper coffee."
He made proper coffee.
The four of them sat in Krause's kitchen — Richard's parents on one side, Krause across from them, Richard between them all — and talked for an hour and twenty minutes about football, about Dortmund, about Nigeria, about the specific pleasure of watching someone you believed in become what you believed they could be.
Krause's German and Richard's parents' English navigated each other with the patient goodwill of people who were determined to communicate regardless of the obstacles between them.
At one point Krause produced the match programme from the 1997 Champions League final — Paris, the one he had attended, the one he had talked about — and set it on the table.
Richard's mother held it carefully.
"He's been to many nights," Richard said quietly, translating between them.
His mother looked at Krause.
Krause looked back.
Something passed between them that required no translation.
"Thank you," she said to him. "For looking after him."
Krause was quiet for a moment. Then: "He looked after himself. I just watched."
Richard said nothing.
His father picked up his coffee.
Outside the Dortmund morning was warm and yellow and eight days from the second leg and the city was already building toward it the way it always built toward the things that mattered — quietly, certainly, with the accumulated belief of a place that had decided something was going to happen and was waiting for the confirmation.
Eight days.
Signal Iduna Park.
His parents in the stands.
Krause with his scarf.
Ella beside him.
The Yellow Wall behind it all.
Richard drank his coffee.
He was ready.