For eighty-eight minutes at the Olimpico, this looked like the day AS Roma's flawless start would finally splinter. Atalanta led, they were in control, and the home crowd had begun to shift uneasily in their seats. Then football did what football does when a team refuses to accept its fate. Mario Hermoso rose, Matías Soulé struck, and a match that seemed lost turned into a triumph that felt almost indecent in its late cruelty.

The 2-1 win keeps Roma alone at the top of the table, three games played, three games won, ten goals scored and just one conceded. It was not their most fluent performance, but champions and contenders are forged as much by the points they steal as the ones they earn in comfort. This was theft of the highest order, executed in the dying breaths of the contest.

Atalanta, for their part, were left to stagger from the pitch clutching at the ghost of a result that had been theirs to keep. They had led through a moment of clean, ruthless finishing, only to watch it dissolve in a whirl of Roma pressure and their own late-collapsing resolve. The seventh place they now occupy does scant justice to how close they came.

Éderson strikes first

The breakthrough came almost immediately after the interval. Two minutes into the second half, Éderson arrived in the centre of the box and lashed a right-footed shot into the top-right corner, a finish of real quality that gave the goalkeeper no chance and the Olimpico no answer. It was the kind of strike that settles nerves and stiffens spines, and Atalanta wore it well.

For long stretches thereafter Atalanta looked the more assured side, content to soak up Roma's increasingly frantic advances and pick their moments to break. Their defensive shape held, their lead looked secure, and the clock ticked with the merciless steadiness that punishes teams chasing a game. Roma's early-season swagger had drained into something closer to desperation.

But leads must be defended to the very last, and Atalanta's grip loosened at precisely the wrong instant. What had been a composed rearguard began to crack under the weight of Roma's late siege. The margins in Serie A are unforgiving, and Atalanta discovered as much in the space of eight brutal minutes.

Hermoso and Soulé turn it

The equaliser arrived in the 89th minute and it came from a set piece, that most reliable of late-game weapons. Soulé swung in a cross following a corner and Mario Hermoso met it with a header from the centre of the box, steering the ball into the bottom-right corner. The Olimpico erupted, part relief, part disbelief, and suddenly a point felt like the very least Roma deserved.

Most sides would have settled for the draw and shaken hands on a hard-earned rescue. Roma smelled blood. Deep into stoppage time, in the 93rd minute, Paulo Dybala threaded the ball to Matías Soulé on the right side of the box, and the young Argentine drilled a left-footed shot into the bottom-right corner. From losing to winning in four intoxicating minutes, Roma had authored one of the great smash-and-grab afternoons.

The final indignity for Atalanta came in the 97th minute, when Gianluca Gaetano was shown a red card, a flash of frustration to cap a collapse that will haunt the visitors' dressing room. It was the punctuation mark on a defeat that felt less like a loss than a robbery. Dybala's assist, Soulé's ice-cold finish, Hermoso's header from the sky, all of it stitched together into a comeback of ruthless intent.

Top of the pile

Nine points from nine, ten goals scored, one conceded. Roma's numbers read like a manifesto, and this victory carried a message beyond the arithmetic. Teams that win when playing poorly, teams that find goals when the well appears to have run dry, are the teams that stay the course. The Olimpico now believes, and belief at this stage of a season can be worth more than any single scoreline.

The manner of it matters, too. To be behind with a minute of normal time remaining and to emerge with all three points requires nerve that cannot be coached. Soulé's contribution, a cross for one goal and a decisive strike for another, marks him as a player growing into the moment. Dybala's craft supplied the killer pass. This was Roma at their most cussedly resilient.

There will be sterner tests, and days when the comeback does not arrive on cue. But for now the summit belongs to Roma, and they will not surrender it lightly. A perfect start has become something more substantial: a statement of ambition, delivered in the cruellest and most thrilling fashion.

Atalanta's reckoning

For Atalanta the reckoning is a bruising one. Two wins and a defeat from three, six points, seventh in the table, and a scoreline that flatters neither their earlier control nor their late capitulation. Éderson's goal ought to have been the foundation of a fine away result. Instead it became a footnote to a collapse that will sting for days.

The concern will not be the quality of their football, which was for long spells superior, but the fragility that surfaced when it mattered most. Conceding twice in the closing moments, then losing a man to a red card, speaks to a side that lost its composure at the decisive hour. Those are the lessons that shape a season, learned the hard way.

There is time to recover, and enough evidence in the performance to suggest better days lie ahead. Atalanta remain a threat to anyone. But they will drive away from the Olimpico knowing they gave away a game they had all but won, and that particular species of regret is the hardest to shake.