It was 30 years ago, but John Higgins remembers it as if it was yesterday.
Two fresh-faced 20-year-olds going head-to-head in an epic quarter-final at the 1996 World Snooker Championship, with the Scot one frame away from defeating England's Ronnie O'Sullivan.
"That is one match that sticks in my mind," said Higgins. "I was 12-11 in front and I remember it as clear as day."
The colours are all on their spots – a regular training programme usually dispatched with ease for a man of his talent. Pot them all and he is in the semi-finals for the first time.
Legendary BBC commentator Ted Lowe, predicting trouble may be ahead in the Crucible cauldron, says: "The butterflies must be floating around his tummy."
Higgins, with perfect memory 30 years on, takes up the story: "I've got an easy clearance with the colours. I normally pot the brown and just play off the side cushion and be above the blue.
"This time I decided just to stun the blue down when you're under a bit of pressure. I was well below the blue. I went round the cushion, went round the angles and landed a very tough rest shot."
Still, Higgins is only two shots from the semi-finals. But the tricky pink is missed, O'Sullivan cleans up, wins the decider and Higgins is out.
In the semi-final, O'Sullivan then lost to Peter Ebdon, who was beaten by Stephen Hendry in the final.
"I might have won the World Championship two years earlier than I did," said a rueful Higgins, who admitted that was one of his most painful losses in his 34-year professional career.
"It was a brilliant game. We were only 20 and it was a slugfest, shot for shot. They are the ones that give you a bit of steel going forward, the games that make you as a player.
"You never think of your good wins. It'd be great if you thought of your good wins, but you always think of the ones that got away."
What made the pair's first Crucible match even more remarkable were the circumstances going into it.
The night before, O'Sullivan faced a disciplinary hearing after he had assaulted a World Snooker press officer and could have been thrown out of the tournament.
While Higgins waited in his hotel to see if he would get a bye into the semi-finals, O'Sullivan was getting fined £20,000 and being handed a suspended two-year ban.
"There were conflicting reports that he was going to get thrown out," said Higgins. "I was lying in my bed at night thinking: 'Am I going to get a bite of the semi-finals here?'"
"I didn't know until one o'clock in the morning whether I was going to play Ronnie at 10am.
"I got a phone call in the hotel. I was staring at the old Grosvenor that's not there any more and it basically says: 'Yeah, you're playing Ronnie at 10.'
"So it's just funny how you remember things. That was many years ago, 30 years ago. I remember it as clear as day."
In a truly remarkable story of hard work, endurance, talent and dedication, the pair are still at the top of the sport three decades on and will go head-to-head in the last 16 on Saturday.