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Somewhere in the mud and the destruction a ball appeared, left there by the flood. Six days after the worst catastrophe in Spanish history had taken 229 lives and devastated thousands more, on a street still caked in sludge a game began. Someone recorded it, sharing a moment’s happiness amidst the pain, a little light and hope let in: four boys from the small town of Aldaia covered in dirt, playing among piles of furniture from broken homes. Nineteen days later and seven miles away, a fifth local boy scored the goal of this or any season.

At 2.12pm on Saturday, seven minutes into Valencia’s first game since the catastrophe – not so much a football match as an expression of community, one giant, collective embrace – the ball dropped to César Tárrega at the south end of Mestalla. It was a simple finish, but if these fans have seen better goals, they hadn’t felt any like this. Suddenly, the silence – and it had been so, so silent – was broken, all those emotions escaping. Tárrega had cried in the quiet before kick off; now he let go, tears returning to his eyes. Then he ran to collect a shirt, holding it high. On the back, a message had been printed: “Tots junts eixirem.” Together, we will come through this.

Born and raised in Aldaia, Tárrega got a call at about 10.30pm on the night of 29 October, telling him that everything was flooding. His home, a town of 32,200 people in the Horta Sud, inland from the regional capital, was one of the worst hit. It hadn’t rained much there but the water from a year’s worth of precipitation in 48 hours rushed down towards them, the Saleta ravine overflowing. The mayor, Guillermo Luján, described it as a “tsunami”. Six people died, mud covered everything, cars were swept into macabre piles. Unwarned and abandoned, 99% of the homes had been affected, Luján said. Among them, the building where Tárrega’s parents, Esther and Manolo, live on the third floor.

Just under a week later, a group of young kids were helping clean up, shovels, buckets and brooms in hand. As they worked, a little boy named Iker, aged five or six, found a ball buried and, as one of the boys’ dads put it, “what had to happen, happened”. Three began to play, a fourth asked if he could join in and soon they were squelching through thick mud, slipping with every kick, picking their way past fridges and furniture, possessions piled in the street. They didn’t know they were being recorded and it wasn’t much of a match but it was everything. The images went viral, the television station turning up. The metaphor was unmissable, the symbolism inescapable.

Already a focal point of the community and the rescue effort, Mestalla becoming a giant store for aid and support, Valencia invited the kids to their Paterna training ground. Iker, Alejandro, Roberto and Álvaro, accompanied by Alexis and Valentina, met managerRubén Baraja and his players, a dozen of them. Games were set up, the pitch green and the ball white this time. “We played with Cesar Tárrega: he’s from my town,” Roberto said.

“Together we will come through this” – Cesar Tárrega sends a message after scoring for Valencia. Photograph: Quality Sport Images/Getty Images

At that point Valencia were not playing and didn’t know when they would, or if they really wanted to yet. La Liga had played on, but they could not. For 26 days, they did not return. “We have people who’ve lost homes, family members,” Baraja said. It is not only Tárrega – Yarek and Rubén Iranzo had been directly affected as had the team delegate, Voro – but that he, another kid from Aldaia, should score the first when this weekend they finally did reappear, felt fitting.

It all did. After almost a month away and three games postponed – against Real Madrid and Espanyol in the league, Parla Escuela in the Copa del Rey – Valencia came back against Real Betis this Saturday. They did so uneasily, unsure how it would be, how it should be, how they would and should feel too, let alone how they would perform, wondering whether it was right. By the end, few doubted that it was. Not because Valencia won 4-2, securing their second win of the season and climbing off the bottom of the table, or at least not only that, but because of something else, something deeper. “What we want is for people to feel that we are with them, that we are there for them,” Baraja had said. “Sometimes a friend needs something: take it to them.” And so they did.

Football is an escape, the old line says, a means of forgetting. But that is not always true: sometimes it is the opposite, not about avoiding life but embracing it, marking it. This is what football is for, what it is. Community, identity, belonging. There is probably no greater meeting place in Valencian society than Mestalla, nowhere with the mystique, history or even just the size, a ground where a sign marks the water level from the last time there was a flood, in 1957. If Saturday was almost like a funeral, that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t have happened but that it should: a homage not to a person but a people, a rite of passage that was sad and moving but beautiful. A catharsis, one paper called it. A comfort, perhaps, a source of solace, honouring those who had passed and those who had suffered, maybe not easing the suffering exactly but sharing it; 43,975 people were there.

In the morning, Betis had visited a school in Alfafar, delivering material. In the stands, their fans, many of them from Valencia too, held a banner of support. Buses had collected around 500 Valencia supporters from the towns worst hit; many of those have, of course, been left without cars. Of the club’s season ticket holders, around 8,500 are from areas devastated by the flood. Nino Bravo’s Mi Tierra (My Land) went round. Rei Ortola played Voces de Valencia (Voices of Valencia). When the teams came out, there was no cheer, only applause, the sound of a cello and his guitar. A 50-metre wide Valencian flag, first unfurled at the Santiago Bernabéu and then handed to second-division Levante when they returned last week, playing in “mud stained” kits, covered the pitch. Twenty-two children who play for clubs in the worst-hit areas were there in their teams’ shirts.

Betis players had visited Alfafar, one of the worst-hit areas of destruction before the game. Photograph: José Manuel Vidal/EPA

A big black ribbon was carried on to the pitch. Valencia’s players wore black kits, “united, as always” on the front. On the bench, Baraja wore a black suit and a black tie. In the stands, there were messages of loss – “this is for you, Rubén” – words of thanks to the thousands of volunteers who had come to their aid, and a hush. As the players stood and the Valencian anthem played, performed with traditional local instruments, a black banner came down listing all the places hit. For the entire game, those names appeared on the scoreboard, one after the other, every two seconds. A red and yellow mosaic in the region’s colours covered the rest of the ground. There was a minute’s silence, deep and lingering. Tears came quietly, cameras caught a lady trembling.

As the players stood, the Betis captain Marc Bartra gently put an arm around Hugo Duro’s shoulder. Duro admitted that he had struggled to keep it together in the team talk, players held in a tight huddle as captain José Luis Gayà spoke; for a man who had volunteered in Chiva and Picanya, it wasn’t easy now either. “I’m an emotional person and it is like there has been a war here,” he said. All around, people swallowed hard. As for Tárrega, he could not contain the tears, blowing hard to stop himself breaking entirely.

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When the kid from Aldaia scored, just seven minutes in, he couldn’t contain anything. “César has suffered a lot over these weeks and he deserves to score the goal so that he could dedicate it to every valenciano and all the people in his town,” teammate Diego López said. “This is for all of you,” Tarrega wrote later. Mestalla had been quiet until then, strange and still, like this wasn’t real, wasn’t an actual game. The goal came as a kind of permission, that moment that makes you smile, breaking people but releasing them too. A reminder: you are allowed to enjoy this, to live. In fact, you’re supposed to.

Which didn’t mean it was done, or just another game now. When Betis equalised there was no celebration. Instead, Aitor Ruibal and Bartra went to the touchline, raised a Valencia flag and Mestalla applauded them. When Chimy Ávila got Betis’s second late on, he did not celebrate either. By then, though, Valencia had scored three more anyway: Duro got two of them, López the other. “I hit it with all my soul, thinking of the people,” the winger said. Victory had been secured, felt differently but perhaps more deeply than any other; perhaps needed too. There has never been a game like this. “Maybe they played with the extra emotion of what this means,” Ávila suggested. As the whistle approached, Mestalla stood and sang the Valencian anthem together, like it was the final hymn before it all came to a close and the congregation departed, brought there by the ball.

“The emotion we felt ... I had goosebumps,” Baraja said. “We wanted to honour the victims, everyone affected. We want to be there for them, for them to know we’re here. We want to be with society, hold their hands and not let go. We want them to get their lives back; it won’t happen soon and we will never forget. But if those who came, watched on television or just saw the score can smile, if we’ve changed their day a little, helped them in some small way, let them enjoy themselves for a little while then we’ve done something. And that is what we play for.”

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