Gvidas Gineitis swung it in and Ché Adams climbed above a crowd of Milan defenders to hit it right-footed on the drop, from a position where most forwards would have nodded it wide and jogged back apologising. Torino lost 1-2 anyway.
Which is a shame, because it finished a night that already belonged to Rúben Amorim, whose first Serie A game in charge of Milan was won by Cissé and Rabiot long before Adams got round to reminding everyone what he can still do with a ball arriving over his shoulder at an awkward height.
The one that got away for nothing
So how did Southampton manage to lose him without banking a single pound?
His deal ran out in the summer of 2024. Torino put three years in front of him and he took it ahead of the Premier League clubs who came calling, while the club back home had a top-flight season to plan and decided the money was better spent elsewhere. Saints Marching later filed him among the players who improved after leaving, which is one way of putting it.
Forty-eight goals in a Southampton shirt. The sixteen that came in the promotion season are the ones worth chewing on this week, because Tonda Eckert is trying to do the same job with a squad that looks nothing like that one.
There is a particular flavour of annoyance reserved for watching a player you gave up on do something ridiculous on a Sunday night in Turin.
What it says about Saints now
The line back then was that Adams had peaked and the club needed younger legs through the middle.
Two seasons on, he is starting in Serie A, playing for Scotland, and hitting shots like that one at 30.
Southampton have finally got a centre-forward doing what Adams used to do. Cyle Larin has three goals in three games, and Eckert called him the best striker in this division in a press conference ahead of the match with Stoke.
Divin Mubama needed just eleven minutes on Saturday to win that game. Saints Marching has gone on record to say that the club needs no more strikers, and on Saturday's evidence, that is hard to argue with.
So the wound is mostly healed. It just gets picked at every time an old number nine does something like that.
Adams is contracted in Turin until next summer. He is 30, not 35, and that kind of detail often leads to anxious phone calls in January.
Nobody is suggesting a reunion. But if you were watching that goal and felt a twinge, you were not on your own.
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