It reads like the punchline of an April fool's joke.
Yet there was nothing fake or manufactured about that scoreline. The result was really real and quite deserved, as staggering as it may have been. In its storied history Germany had lost just two World Cup qualifiers before Wednesday's shocker in Duisburg. One came as West Germany vs. Portugal in 1985, the other vs. England in 2001. That's the list.
Its 35-match unbeaten streak in qualifying over the course of nearly 20 years now gone, there's a greater sense of doom surrounding the 2014 World Cup champions entering a European Championship summer—where they're grouped with a formidable trio of France, Portugal and Hungary—and a stark reminder that perhaps UEFA's road to Qatar isn't going to be as straightforward as initially anticipated.