I was just a boy, barely into my teens, growing up in a middle-class home in Dhaka, when I first heard his name properly.

The 2010 World Cup had pulled me and a whole generation of us into football, and I began doing what every football-mad kid in Bangladesh did back then: cutting pictures out of newspapers and taping them to my bedroom door, a shrine built with newsprint and glue.

Cristiano Ronaldo was already my hero by then, but even a starstruck boy loyal to one man could not look away from the other.

Messi's face was on that door too, somewhere among the cutouts, because even then, even to a child who barely understood what he was watching, something about him refused to be ignored.

And then, astonishingly, he came to us. In 2011, Argentina played Nigeria in Dhaka, still the biggest football occasion this country has ever hosted. Messi, in the flesh, on our soil. I did not go.

Tickets started at 7,500 taka, a sum that put the biggest match in our history out of reach for most Bangladeshi families, mine included. Whether that was fair is a conversation for another day.

What I remember is watching every minute of it on television instead, not realising how close greatness had come to my own city, and how far I still was from it.

As I grew older, so did his story, and it was never a simple one. There were early tragedies on the biggest stages, and years of a country that seemed unwilling to forgive him for not being Diego.

He was sent off just two minutes into his senior debut against Hungary in 2005, a start that gave no hint of what was to come.

He grew into a supporting cast member of a golden generation before becoming its central piece, only to watch finals slip away one after another.

2014 in Brazil, where he scored four goals, dragged a limited Argentina side to the final almost single-handedly, and still lost to Germany, taking home a Golden Ball that must have felt like a consolation prize for a trophy he wanted far more.

Then came 2015 and 2016, back-to-back Copa America final defeats to Chile, the second ending on penalties, where his own attempt went off target.

That loss broke something in him, briefly. "The national team is over for me," he said, walking away in tears. Argentina refused to let him go. Barely six weeks later, he reversed course and came back.

After that came the resurgence, the Copa America in 2021, and finally Qatar in 2022, when he lifted the one trophy that had eluded him and, in doing so, seemed to answer a question that had followed him for years.

Long before those triumphs, Pele and Maradona were once caught on an open microphone discussing him, Pele asking if Messi was a good person, admitting he did not know him personally, and Maradona replying that he was, but that he lacked the personality of a leader.

Qatar, and everything that followed it, played out like Messi's own quiet reply to that conversation, delivered years too late for either of them to hear it.

He could have stopped there in 2022. He did not. He kept playing, kept turning up for a country that had once doubted him, all the way to this year's World Cup on American soil, chasing one more impossible ending.

He very nearly got it, dragging Argentina to a second consecutive final at 39 years of age, when logic said his legs should have given out long before.

In the end it was Spain, the country that had adopted him as a boy at Barcelona and made him who he became, that stood in his way at the very last, denying him the ending he had chased for two decades.

Yet August brought a grief no trophy could soften, when his father Jorge passed away, the man who had left everything behind in Rosario so a small boy with a growth hormone condition could chase an impossible dream in Barcelona.

Few footballers will ever be tested by a two month stretch as unforgiving as the one Messi endured. He announced his retirement from the national team not long after, in a letter that read like a man finally putting down something impossibly heavy.

"I always fought and gave everything for this shirt, to bring you happiness and make you feel proud to be Argentine through football," he wrote.

He wrote that he had nothing more to give. Anyone who watched him play even once this summer knew that was far from the truth.

Argentines will mourn this longer than anyone else, because Messi was never only a footballer to them.

They had allowed themselves to believe that he would somehow keep playing forever, that there would always be another night, another match, another chance to watch him in the shirt that meant everything.

The comparisons to Maradona will never fully disappear, but I suspect history will simply let them stand as two different men who did the same extraordinary thing for the same complicated country, decades apart.

I do not know, even now, whether Bangladesh's devotion to him was ever really about Argentina at all. I think, more honestly, it was always about him.

Time will tell whether that separation of the man from the country he represented was fair to either of them. But I know what I felt watching him leave the game, and I suspect millions of strangers scattered across the world, in places he never played, felt exactly the same thing.

That, in the end, might be the truest measure of what he gave us. Not the trophies, not the eight Ballon d'Ors, not even the numbers future greats will spend decades trying to match.

It is that the game was better, richer, more alive, simply because he existed inside it.