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 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.”

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Some chased the thoughts away, dismissing them as a waste of energy, a drain on the nerves. Others confronted them, imagining what victory would feel like, remembering how defeat tasted a year ago.

And some, like Klopp, embraced it all. Between Liverpool’s last game of the Premier League campaign and its final appointment of the season this weekend, he gave his players a few days off. He told them to take the chance to unwind, to rest their legs and relax their minds, but he did not afford himself the same privilege.

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For the most part, Klopp saw no reason to shift his focus. He thought, night and day, about Madrid, about Tottenham Hotspur, and about the Champions League final.

For much of the season, the Champions League seemed to take a back seat for Liverpool. The club was embroiled in a breathless race with Manchester City for the Premier League title. To many fans, and certainly to outside observers, ending a 29-year wait to be crowned champion of England was the priority. As late as March, the TV commentator Gary Neville was advising Klopp to concentrate his energies, and those of his players, on domestic affairs, rather than European.

That attitude never took root inside the club. The pain of the defeat to Real Madrid had been too great, the time required to process it too substantial. Klopp, and his players, wanted to make up for the opportunity lost in Kiev.

Liverpool’s James Milner, Trent Alexander-Arnold and Adam Lallana after last year’s loss to Real Madrid in the Champions League final in Kiev, Ukraine.CreditShaun Botterill/Getty Images

They earned the chance with a staggering victory against Barcelona at Anfield on May 7. Five days later, the Premier League season ended: Liverpool beat Wolves to record a total of 97 points. City, though, overcame Brighton, to end with 98. No team has ever won more points — or lost fewer games — and not been crowned champion.

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The mood at Anfield that day was not especially mournful, for all the disappointment. “By the last day, I felt it was gone,” defender Andy Robertson said of the league. “I believed City would beat Brighton.”

Besides, there was that other appealing prize on the horizon: the prospect of a sixth European Cup, a trophy that would not only erase much of the sorrow at missing out on the Premier League, but at last anesthetize the pain of Kiev.

The problem, at least from the outside, was that it was a distant speck on the horizon. The curiosity of the Premier League’s finishing earlier than any of Europe’s other major leagues meant that Liverpool and Tottenham, the two Champions League finalists, had three weeks to wait for the game that would not only define their seasons, but also their players’ reputations and their managers’ legacies. The Champions League final would come only at the end of 21 days of purgatory.

That was not how Klopp, or his staff, saw it. The English calendar is so frenetic that teams rarely have more than a couple of days to train for a specific game. Now there were three whole weeks: to recover, to sharpen bodies and minds, to fine-tune plans, to arrive in Madrid on the crest of a wave. Neither finalist would have an advantage, but both might see the benefits.

“It is an opportunity,” said Andreas Kornmayer, Liverpool’s fitness coach. “Three weeks is good.”

The challenge — for both teams — was to work out how to spend them. For most of a club’s employees, three weeks is barely enough. Arranging a Champions League final is a vast logistical undertaking, one that started before the semifinals with a reconnaissance visit to Madrid and continued, by necessity, even with Liverpool 3-0 down to Lionel Messi and Barcelona after the first leg.

After Klopp’s team had, improbably, secured its place, there were hundreds upon hundreds of jobs to do: tickets to be mailed, charter planes and hotels to be booked, meetings with the Spanish police to be held, media and fan events to be arranged.

Liverpool striker Mohamed Salah went off injured in last year’s final but will get a second shot at the trophy against Tottenham on Saturday.CreditPeter Powell/EPA, via Shutterstock

The first decision — an “easy” one, Klopp said — was to shorten that substantially. Liverpool’s squad was given five days’ break. (Spurs took a different approach, and Klopp, his staff and his players were all at pains, during the reporting of this article, to point out that neither is right or wrong.) “It had been such an intense season,” Klopp said.

In reality, though Klopp insisted he did not want any of his squad “running 10 miles through the forest,” that break included only one or two days on which the players were told not to do any exercise at all.

Each was sent away with a personalized exercise plan, focused on running and core work, tailored to reflect the players’ workload over the course of the season. “Those coming back from injury need a lot more,” Robertson said. His own was lighter: two or three 10-minute runs a day. “Just something to get the heart rate up,” he said.

When the team reconvened, it was not at Melwood, the club’s training facility, but at a hotel just outside the resort of Estepona, on Spain’s Costa del Sol. That, too, was a considerable undertaking. A week before Liverpool departed, the club’s nutritionist, Mona Nemmer, was in touch with the hotel, advising on the menus the team would require.

“We always have travel tins with us,” she said. “We take our supplements, because we would never give the players something they are not familiar with and is not approved, and we have our own spice mixes, our own sauces, our own dips. The players feel comfortable with that.” Fresh ingredients, though, had to be sourced locally, and to Nemmer’s satisfaction.

Klopp and his staff felt it was worth it. “We can be really close together, we can focus on ourselves, there are no distractions,” Kornmayer said. “It is a little mixture between hard work and relaxing. We can get the rhythm back, set the focus, set the right mood.”

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That does not come from trying to rebuild the players’ fitness; after a full season, there is “no need” for that, Kornmayer said. There was no intense running session to welcome the players back, to blow off the cobwebs. “I do not want to kill them,” he said.

Training is much more sophisticated than that. Liverpool did not seek to build intensity but rather to vary it: not only from session to session, but from player to player.

“There is always a moment in a game, however fit you are, when you feel it,” Klopp said. “So we make sure we have those moments in training.” Liverpool’s week in Spain reached its climax with a game last Saturday, away from prying eyes, against Benfica’s reserve team — a chance to ratchet up the intensity, just another notch.

For the most part, though, the mood was relaxed. Klopp and his staff lingered over dinner. At night, a handful of players sat out on the terrace, overlooking the Mediterranean, playing cards. Most days contained double sessions, but one afternoon was set aside for golf.

“It is just about us,” Robertson said. “Being here, in a quiet place, you can shut off quite easily. It is slightly easier away from the noise.”

There would be plenty of that in the final week, particularly the day the news media descended on Melwood, so many that the club asked a local supermarket for permission to use its parking lot as a base for shuttle buses.

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In training, no detail would be left uncovered: Klopp was expecting both teams to unveil new strategies from corners and free kicks, the sort of change the relentlessness of the regular season does not allow. That is the benefit of the long wait, the chance to refine every single aspect of the game, to be as ready as you can ever be.

“It’s like an exam: You can revise as much as you want, but you don’t know what the questions are going to be,” Robertson said. “I guess you could overthink it. But I suppose we’re paid the money so that we don’t.”

On Friday, the squad was scheduled to board a plane at the Liverpool airport, its purgatory at an end. This game will be the last thing they think about for one more night, and the first thing they think about for one more morning, and then it will be here, the game they have been thinking about for three weeks, the game they have been awaiting for a year.