As the Paris Saint-Germain squad celebrated down the Anfield Road end on Tuesday night, the tear-strewn face of Mohamed Salah said everything you needed to know about a sobering evening for Liverpool.
The Egypt star has moved mountains this season in his efforts to help put Liverpool's name on the Premier League trophy but that clearly hasn't diminished his appetite for another Champions League crown.
Salah's quiet sadness, as he stood in the centre circle at full time of an absorbing, thrilling spectacle for the neutral, suddenly brought the mortality of his Anfield career back into sharp focus.
And his reaction to the last-16 defeat to PSG translated as someone who might feel as though his final chance of European glory had slipped from his grasp at the age of 32.
Salah has spoken as a matter of fact all season about this being his final year at Anfield and with his contract expiring at the end of the campaign, it's a stance that cannot really be called into question. As long as no new agreeable deal is floated across the table of agent Ramy Abbas, then the Reds' No.11 is simply stating the obvious - that he will be leaving at the expiry of his current terms.
Virgil van Dijk's admission on Tuesday night that he is unsure as to just what will happen over his own future as talks continue behind the scenes was both jarring and alarming to many.
Given that the season is approaching its final international break and the first piece of silverware is about to handed out this weekend, it would be reasonable for supporters to feel that further progress should have been made on the contract status of three of their biggest stars in Salah, Van Dijk and Trent Alexander-Arnold.
But if club captain Van Dijk insists, with genuine sincerity, that he is still in the dark over what will happen next, it's fair to assume that Salah is similarly none the wiser over his own situation. It's why the tears that flowed in light of a Champions League exit were so evident.
Was that Salah's Last Dance in the European Cup? It should be an unthinkable prospect for the club given his enduring brilliance.
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There is also the theory that Salah's anguish was also, in part, due to a belief that his own ambitions to lift the Ballon d'Or had sailed on by with a departure from the Champions League. It is a fair point given how fiercely dedicated and obsessed the former Roma man is about squeezing everything he can from what is a short career at the elite level.
Such individualistic thinking should not be criticised where Salah is concerned, it is largely what has launched him to these heights to begin with and without it, there would be a lot more names above him in the club's all-time list of goalscorers than just Roger Hunt and Ian Rush.
But if something productive and positive is to emerge from the ashes of Liverpool's Champions League campaign, there is a notion that Salah should harness his pain to ensure he is once more back at the cutting edge of the world's most glamorous club competition next time out.
He is too good to go shuffling off from the centre stage of Europe just yet, even for someone who will be 33 before next year's kicks off. The Champions League remains the epicentre of club football and Liverpool will start next year with as much chance as any. No marginal shootout loss to a classy PSG side should change the thinking for Salah.
The manner of the penalties defeat and the misfortune of drawing a side as complete as PSG after topping the inaugural 36-team group stage might just harden Salah's resolve to go again next time out - still as a Liverpool player.
