As on their two previous European Cup final appearances, Manchester United will travel to Moscow this month accompanied by a sense of destiny. “Fate is fate,” Sir Alex Ferguson said on Tuesday night as he contemplated the prospect of winning the Champions League 50 years after the Munich air disaster, though experience taught him to stop short of declaring precisely what that fate might be.

By his own admission, Ferguson has been “a wee bit nervous” all season about the emotional burden that his team had been carrying on the path that they now finally know will lead to Moscow. Some will doubt whether such a responsibility can really be felt by a multinational group of highly paid youngsters with their own agendas to pursue, but ask any of those players - Wayne Rooney, Cristiano Ronaldo, Patrice Evra - about Munich and they will mention the January afternoon when Ferguson sat them down to watch a documentary about the disaster and to listen to an address from Sir Bobby Charlton. Ferguson said that “you could have heard a pin drop”.

All of this brings an extra sense of poignancy to United's appearance in the final on May 21, but that is nothing new to the club. When they first lifted the giant trophy in 1968, defeating Benfica at Wembley, it was ten years after Duncan Edwards and seven other members of Matt Busby's team perished after an air crash in Munich. Their second triumph, after a dramatic comeback to beat Bayern Munich in Barcelona, came on May 26, 1999 on what would have been Busby's 90th birthday. On both occasions it was seen as their destiny.

But what of the numerous occasions when United failed to fulfil their destiny? In 1998, when they fell to AS Monaco at the quarter-final stage, it was 40 years after Munich; in 2002, when Ferguson planned to retire, the final was in Glasgow, the city of his birth, and they were beaten by Bayer Leverkusen in the semi-finals; in 2003, when the final was at Old Trafford, they lost to Real Madrid in the quarter-finals. Destiny, it seems, is only ever destiny when the story follows the script.

But Paul Scholes, if he was the sentimental type, would be forgiven for feeling that it was a sense of destiny that drove him to score the spectacular goal that beat Barcelona on Tuesday. In 1999, while Peter Schmeichel, David Beckham, Ole Gunnar Solskjaer and others cavorted around the Nou Camp with the trophy, Scholes and Roy Keane, the captain, were on the periphery of the celebrations, dressed in suits, having missed the final through suspension. Keane never got the chance to make up for that, but now Scholes has the opportunity.

According to Ferguson, he will be the first name on the teamsheet in Moscow, while the club are expected to offer him a one-year extension to his contract, which expires at the end of next season.

Scholes was the man everyone wanted to talk to at Old Trafford on Tuesday night, but, true to form, he dodged the media scrum, leaving others to pay tribute. “Scholesy didn't say much afterwards,” Michael Carrick, his midfield colleague, said. “He just slipped away very quickly. That's just the way he is. But he's a superb player, maybe not as appreciated as he should have been. I've never met a character like Scholesy, certainly not someone who's that good. I think he's a footballer's footballer.”

Scholes's place in United folklore is already guaranteed, but for others the final in Moscow will bring the opportunity to write their name indelibly in the pages of the club's history.

For players such as Rio Ferdinand, Ronaldo and Rooney, it will be a first Champions League final. For Edwin van der Sar, who won the tournament with Ajax in 1995 and lost in the final a year later, it will be an opportunity that he feared would never come around again. The same applies to Ferguson, but it also applies to the club as a whole, for whom something that looks suspiciously like destiny is beckoning once more.

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