There is a mountain ahead of Manchester United in Catalonia on Tuesday night but it's nothing as steep as the obstacle of 25 years ago when they faced Johan Cruyff's stellar team of Romario, Guardiola, Stoichkov and Koeman.
If that wasn't daunting enough they had to do it with their talisman suspended — and had to deal with the rule that meant you could only field three foreign players.
Goalkeeper Gary Walsh's prime concern on the eve of the match was a hope that Sir Alex Ferguson had not seen him in a training session on the Nou Camp pitch.
Gary Walsh (front right) trudged off the pitch after conceding four goals at Barcelona in 1994
'For some reason (Simply Red frontman) Mick Hucknall had taken part in shooting practice,' Walsh tells Sportsmail. 'He put one past me. The shot went straight through me. I was just praying Alex hadn't seen it.'
He apparently had not, given that the following morning at 9.30, Walsh received a knock on his hotel room door and opened it to the manager, who told him he would be playing.
'To this day, I've no idea why he played me instead of Peter Schmeichel,' Walsh says. 'Perhaps he wanted more outfield options with the three-foreigner rule restricting him.'
Ferguson confirms as much in his first autobiography, Managing My Life. He was forced to choose three from Schmeichel, Andrei Kanchelskis, Roy Keane and Denis Irwin, with Eric Cantona suspended.
And though he protected Walsh from anxiety by making the call late — 'I slept so well the night before the game but it was too late to get my family out there,' Walsh recalls — the 24-year-old was equal to the psychological challenge.
As he walked down the tunnel before the group-stage game, he saw a few Barcelona players in the club's little chapel. Then came the wall of sound.
'I think there were 115,000 in the place and I recall being struck by how high the stands were,' he says. 'They seemed to go up to the sky.'
Ryan Giggs (left) watched on as Mick Hucknell (centre) took part in Manchester United training
This was a United side who were finally reacquainted with winning titles, would claim the Champions League within five years and could have won that season's home game against the Catalans, which they drew 2-2.
'We felt we were very much on their level,' Mark Hughes, who scored in the Old Trafford tie, tells Sportsmail. 'I remember jumping for my goal and it going in off the side or back of my head.'
Hughes feels that the three-foreigner rule — which applied to Irish players but not Welsh — was very significant in the Nou Camp, where he had appeared as a Barcelona player seven years earlier.
'Romario and Hristo Stoichkov, those were the two,' he says. 'From the off we found it difficult to cope with them.
'But we were hamstrung with selection. That was always a frustration for us.'
The first goal, a clean Stoichkov strike, went in after just nine minutes. 'The two of them moved so fast,' Walsh relates. 'You wouldn't believe the speed they attacked us with and the way they shifted the ball between them.
