The final of this year's Champions Cup is both traditional and novel. It yokes together the two most successful teams in the history of the competition, but who strangely have never met in the decider.
They were both right there at the beginning for the European club competition's maiden voyage, in the months after the sport went 'open'.
Toulouse immediately established themselves as European rugby's chief aristocrats by winning the inaugural tournament by beating Cardiff in the final, which certainly dates it.
Like the 1987 Rugby World Cup, the first edition was a ramshackle forerunner of what was to follow, with mid-week afternoon group games and fairly small crowds, and an English boycott to boot. (They also skipped the 1998-99 edition, which Ulster won). The Ford Model-T of Heineken Cups: The Arms Park was only half-full for the Toulouse-Cardiff final, played on the first weekend of January 1996.
Leinster were still in an odd halfway house between club side and representative outfit and thus fielded players who were then contracted to clubs in the English Premiership. Conor O'Shea, who was togging for London Irish at weekends, has the honour of scoring Leinster's first ever try in the Heineken Cup in the insalubrious surrounds of a Milan industrial estate.
Jim Glennon, then head coach, would spend the first couple of campaigns negotiating with the likes of Clive Woodward to secure the release of his players for provincial duty.
Rugby's equivalent of the Champions League didn't make much of a dent in the broader Irish consciousness in its fledgling days in the late 1990s - or the Eddie Hekenui years as Donnybrook veterans might recall them.
Even Ulster's 1999 triumph, in a season admittedly weakened by the absence of the then dominant English clubs, was a Belfast-centric affair and wasn't widely embraced south of the border, in truth.
It wasn't until Munster took down Toulouse in a sun-drenched Bordeaux semi-final that the Heineken Cup fully emerged as a big-time mainstream prize, a glistening holy grail.
Toulouse, while never imposing a suffocating stranglehold on the tournament, picked up further titles at reasonable intervals. With Trevor Brennan as backrow enforcer, they won an all-French final against Perpignan in Lansdowne Road in 2003, and another two years later in Murrayfield against Stade Francais. Brennan's ill-advised foray into crowd control a few years later saw his career ended prematurely, the ex-Barnhall man apparently unable to tolerate the quality of pints in 'De Danu' being called into question.
The former Irish No. 6 was the main linkage between Leinster and Toulouse, having played for the former between 1996 and 2001, winning the inaugural Celtic League as a replacement in his final year.
In between '03 and '05, Toulouse blew their chance of a first and only back-to-back in incredible fashion, Clement Poitrenaud delivering a masterclass in borderline offensive nonchalance to allow Rob Howley nip in for the winning try for Wasps. The kind of display that only a French back-three player could (a) be guilty of and (b) brush off easily.
Famously, it was Leinster who ended Toulouse's reign in a stunning quarter-final in 2006, one of the greatest of all Heineken Cup games. Denis Hickie's scintillating try on the hour mark is forever implanted in the minds of their supporters.
Nonetheless, Leinster were trapped in the shadow of Munster's charismatic golden generation, and widely derided as weak-minded underachievers.
2009, a landmark year for Irish rugby generally, was the year the worm turned. The Munster-Leinster Croke Park semi-final, played a month after Ireland's first Grand Slam in 61 years, was a glorious full-stop on Irish rugby's renaissance decade of the 2000s.
Munster triumphalism had reached such a pitch at that stage that Leinster, in the now alien role of underdogs, enjoyed a fair degree of neutral support that day - hell, even the western-most of the '12-county army' were probably inclined to root for them. This was the moment when Johnny Sexton let a roar in Ronan O'Gara's face after Leinster's opening try, triggering a new Campbell-Ward style tussle for the Irish 10 jersey over the next four years.
Leinster scraped over the line in their first Heineken Cup final against Leicester that May. In the ensuing years, as Joe Schmidt replaced Michael Cheika as coach, and the Munster noughties generation began to age and move on, Leinster gradually became the overweening dominant force in Irish provincial rugby.
2012 marked the apogee for the O'Driscoll generation, as they trampled Ulster underfoot in an all-Irish final in Twickenham. This, needless to say, was too much to bear for the perennially restless Premiership sides, who began lobbying for reforms not long after.
Feelings towards Leinster Rugby among their rivals and the rugby-phobic went directly from derision to resentment. Some of the sheen and romance came off the Heineken/ Champions Cup in the 2010s, with Leinster's pre-eminence increasingly taken for granted, despite their habit of faltering late in the tournament. Evidently, the floating punters and those from outside rugby's heartlands found Munster a more palatable bandwagon to hop aboard during their glory years.
After a violent transitional wobble in Leo Cullen's first season in charge - 2015-16 - Leinster have played their most thrilling rugby in the years since, with Stuart Lancaster and latterly Jacques Nienaber arriving as high-profile and influential coaches (and with World Cup winning coach Graham Henry doing a brief stint as a coaching consultant.)
Though, surprisingly, they've only added one more Champions Cup win, crawling over the line against Racing 92 in a tryless final in 2018.
Having blown the last two European Cup finals in agonising fashion, losing a third would see the 'chokers' taunts grow louder. With the Irish team regarded in some quarters as Leinster in green jerseys, the quarter-final loss in Paris last October has been included as a damning verdict on their big game mentality.
In the past five seasons, Leinster have demolished Toulouse in three semi-finals - and yet only the French side have won the big prize in that span. Dupont and co had no problem overcoming La Rochelle in a European decider, claiming their fifth title in front of a half-full Twickenham in 2021.
The shaky manner of Leinster's semi-final victory was perhaps a worrying sign that they are losing altitude as the season draws to a close.
Many are gleefully awaiting another final implosion. Or perhaps Jacques Nienaber's Springbok-style Cup final mentality is about to come into its own. There's a lot on the line as Leinster seek to banish recent demons and join their opponents at the head of the European roll of honour.
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