The top five Champions League finals I've seen

"We were sitting in the dressing room and we could clearly hear thousands of fans singing You'll Never Walk Alone. Can you imagine how that felt? We were 3-0 down in the Champions League final and all we could hear were 45,000 people letting us know they still believed in us. We knew they had endured a long journey and made so many sacrifices to be there. It was at that point we started to believe too." -- Liverpool's Luis Garcia, on what inspired his team's amazing comeback in the 2005 Champions League final in Istanbul.

While England won't be participating in this year's Euro 2008 festivities in Austria and Switzerland, at least it gets an all-English Champions League final to cheer for when Chelsea FC and Manchester United FC take to the pitch at Moscow's Luzhniki Stadium on May 21.

For the stat fan in all of us, this will only be the third time in the Champions League's 50 or so year history (it was previously known as the European Champion Clubs' Cup, which was often abbreviated to European Cup) that clubs from the same country have met in the finale. The other two times? Well, those happened ever so recently ... twice in the last eight years, in fact. In 2003, AC Milan beat Juventus FC in an all-Italian finale, and three years before that Real Madrid CF bested Valencia CF in an all-Spanish finale.

In honor (honour?), of this momentous occasion, here are the top five Champions League finals I've seen (going all the way back to 2002ish) ...

5. AC Milan 2-1 over Liverpool, 2007 -- AC Milan got a measure of revenge for that epic collapse in the 2005 Champions League final.

4. Real Madrid 2-1 over Bayer Leverkusen Fußball-bund, 2002 -- I remember this game only because it was played about a month before the first World Cup I can remember actually being excited to watch. It also marked the last time a German Bundesliga team played in the UEFA Champions League finale.

3. Barcelona 2-1 over Arsenal, 2006 -- Barca won, despite getting no goals from Ronaldinho, a precursor of things to come for the Brazilian in that year's World Cup.

2. AC Milan 0-0 (3-2 pen.) over Juventus, 2003 -- Watched this game from the Cock N Bull Pub in beautiful Santa Monica, Calif. Just happened to have off of work that day. It was cool drinking Guinness at 11 a.m.

1. Liverpool 3-3 (3-2 pen.) over AC Milan, 2005 -- Greatest Champions League final ever ... and to argue with a guy who's only seen a few of the 50 or so Champions League finals would be foolhardy.