Odense Handball made handball history on Sunday, but it did not turn out to be the fairtale which the players had dreamed of as Györ proved too strong in the Champions League final.
The defending champions from Hungary won the club's seventh CL-title since 2013 through a scoreline of 29-27 while Odense must be content to have reached their first final ever..... the first Danish women's team in a CL-final since 2010.
Odense were in the final for the first time, and no debutant has yet managed to go all the way since the format was introduced in the 2013/14 season.
The orange-clad Danes seemed feverish from the start of the match. The experience of standing in the final in a nearly full MVM Dome with 20,000 spectators seemed to affect the Odense-players who made a string of technical errors in the beginning of the match to allow the home side to take a 5-1 lead before coach Ole Gjekstad called a timeout.
That stopped the major bleeding, but Odense's normally well-oiled attacking machine was severely hampered. Not least because the pivotal player Helena Elver couldn't get her normally stylish game going against a stubborn Hungarian defense.
With the impressive comeback from the semi-final in mind where Odense were behind with no less than seven goals against Metz, the Danes fought on undeterred throughout the match and for a long time stayed within a distance as long as another impressive comeback was still mathematically possible.
With 14 minutes left, Odense limited the gap to three goals, and Helena Elver gradually recovered her playmaking abilities.
Odense bravely fought on but Györ, enjoying European final experience in abundance, never allowed the Danes to come closer than a two-goal deficit until there was only a minute left, and the comeback was out of reach.