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ESTEPONA, Spain — Some Liverpool players found it was in the evening when their minds tended to wander. It was then, once the children were in bed or training was done, that their thoughts would drift to the Champions League: back to Kiev, forward to Madrid, lingering on what might have been, and what could yet be.
Others were caught when they were most vulnerable: as they went to sleep, or as they woke up, those moments either side of consciousness, when you cannot help yourself. For them, as one member of Jürgen Klopp’s squad put it, Saturday’s final against Tottenham has been “the last thing you think about at night and the first thing you think about in the morning.