And so, for Ronaldo, the cycle is complete. Four years after one World Cup final was lost because, legend will have it, of his inability to perform when it mattered most, another has been won thanks to his brilliance.

Finally, the 25-year-old can put behind him the pain he endured in Paris and reflect instead on the glory in which he basked yesterday at Yokohama.

As he stood on the sidelines and wept with joy during the closing minutes of his team's victory, there was no doubting how desperately he had yearned for this redemption.

He earned it with two second-half goals that stunned an undeniably brave German side. For long stretches through the early part of the game, Rudi Voller's men had looked stronger and played with more confidence than their South American opponents.

Nobody had ever quite got to grips with this Brazilian attack over the past month, though, and the three-times winners were not, as it turned out, going to change that now.

The pity of it was that it was an error by Oliver Kahn - brilliant for most of this tournament and almost all of this match - that handed Ronaldo the half-chance he needed to open the scoring 23 minutes from the end.

At 33, the goalkeeper is unlikely to get the sort of opportunity enjoyed by the Brazilian to make amends when Germany play host to the tournament in four years.

Yet he and his team-mates can take enormous pride from the strength of a performance that must, early on, have shaken the Brazilians.

Over the course of their six previous games at these finals, though, Luiz Felipe Scolari's side had suggested that they would have more than enough attacking talent to dispose of a team which tended to sit back and draw their opponents on to them.

Voller seemed well aware of the problem, for his side were much more positive through the early stages than in any of their earlier knock-out games and, for a half an hour or so, Scolari's men were clearly struggling to cope with the vigour of the challenge they faced.

For the 30 minutes their defence was tested in a way that they had not been by any of their more recent opponents. And, on a handful of occasions, they were reduced to scrambling the ball upfield in an attempt to buy the time required to recover their composure.

In their most difficult spell, they would have been lost had their goalkeeper not played well, but, as he had done more than once previously during the past few weeks, Marcos again proved his worth to the team with a commanding display and a couple of quite wonderful saves.

Even with the Palmeiras player performing so well, the Germans might have taken the lead during those early stages had Miroslav Klose been a little quicker to grab the chances that came his way.

While Bernd Schneider wreaked havoc from just in front of the Brazilian defence, though, and Oliver Neuville repeatedly left Lucio trailing after him with his swift movement around the edge of the area, Klose failed to justify the lofty comparisons that have been made between him and some of his country's great strikers of the past.

For the Brazilians, though, the commitment with which their opponents were attempting to dictate the course of the game caused no end of problems.

Neither Cafu nor Roberto Carlos seemed capable of making any contribution to the attacking side of their team's game due to the determination of Marco Bode and Torsten Frings to get forward.

Rivaldo, meanwhile, was gradually sucked back into midfield where he pitched in with Gilberto Silva and Kleberson's attempts to stifle the quick passing moves forward that were being produced across the width of the German midfield.

Kleberson, as it happened, also had a couple of Brazil's best scoring chances and after the game had largely turned in his side's favour towards the end of the half he came within inches of opening the scoring with a delicately curling shot from the edge of the area that had Kahn beaten but came crashing back of the crossbar.

It was the only occasion until the goal in which the Bayern Munich goalkeeper didn't look on top of things. When Ronaldo slipped the ball just the wrong side of the left hand post after Ronaldinho had sent him clear with a wonderful pass that sailed between Carsten Ramelow and Christoph Metzelder, it is debatable whether the German had that bottom corner of his goal covered.

But when the Brazilian hit the target, as he did twice from close range during the final 15 minutes of the period, Kahn's reactions were superb.

The closest the Germans came to scoring themselves was three minutes after the break when Neuville struck a fiercely swerving free from some 35 years out that Marcos somehow managed to push on to the post.

It was the last time he was required to make a save of note although the same striker might have put his side in front just past the hour when he came close to connecting with Schneider's low angled ball from the left.

By then, however, the Brazilians had finally taken a grip on midfield where it was now the German pairing of Dietmar Hamann and Jens Jeremies who were finding it difficult to limit the extent to which their central defence was exposed.

Ronaldinho continued to look the most creatively influential of his side's attacking triumvirate, but Rivaldo had now taken up a far more advanced position where alongside Ronaldo he finally began to pose a real threat to Khan.

When the Inter striker dispossessed Hamann 25 yards out and quickly pushed the ball short to Rivaldo in the 67th minute, though, the apparent danger to the German goal still seemed rather slight.

The 30-year-old's shot was firmly struck, but sent straight towards Kahn. However, the goalkeeper then spilled it directly into the path of Ronaldo who had slipped through a line of German defenders in anticipation of just such an opportunity.

The German desperately lunged to make the block, but the Brazilian was never going to miss. It was, he said afterwards, "brutal" punishment of "my only mistake of the tournament".

Voller attempted to change things, bringing on Oliver Bierhoff and Gerald Asamoah in an attempt to restore some bite to his own side's attack, but the former disappeared almost without trace while the latter seemed to become bogged down in helping out on the right side of the team's defence.

It was he who came closest to preventing Ronaldo's second goal - his eighth in seven games at these finals - 11 minutes from time, but after Rivaldo had removed Tomas Linke from the defensive equation by drawing his towards him and then stepping over Kleberson's cross from the right there was little the Schalke player could do to prevent his opponent from taking a single touch and then sweeping the ball low between Kahn and the foot of the goalkeeper's left-hand post.

All hope was gone and the Germans knew it. Bierhoff's only contribution to the proceedings came four minutes later when his shot on the turn forced another good stop from Marcos, but, after that, the Brazilians simply put in time as their many supporters in the stadium got increasingly into the swing of their celebrations.

When the end came, there was pandemonium, both in the stands and on the pitch where some of the victorious team rushed to embrace their manager Luiz Felipe Scolari and Ronaldo, who had been replaced just before the end of the 90 minutes, and others fell to their knees in prayer.

At the other end of the pitch, Linke attempted the impossible when he sought to console Kahn. His Bayern Munich team-mate bore the haunted look of a man who believed he had let his side down.

It was a look that Ronaldo would have known well, of course, had he cast a glance in the German's direction, but in a different place and what must have felt like a lifetime or more ago.