Stunning Collapse vs. Liverpool Will Forever Mar Borussia Dortmund's Season

Borussia Dortmund found themselves on the wrong end of an historic night at Anfield on Thursday, surrendering a two-goal lead to Liverpool and exiting the UEFA Europa League in stoppage time.

It's difficult to put the Black and Yellows' meltdown into words.

"It feels very sobering. Now we feel very, very empty," said head coach Thomas Tuchel, struggling to put these crazy 90 minutes into perspective, per the club's official website. "We suddenly got the jitters. We gave it away today," said team captain Mats Hummels.

That's the most damning indictment of Dortmund's night at Anfield: They lost it more than Liverpool won it.

It was a magical night for the Reds, but none of their four goals required sorcery. A simple through ball beat a badly positioned Sokratis Papastathopoulos for Divock Origi's goal shortly after the second-half kick-off and, late in the game, two set pieces doomed Dortmund.

The Ruhr side used up all their luck, it seems, in the first leg at home, where Roman Weidenfeller's incredible saves against Origi and Philippe Coutinho kept Dortmund in the tie. The 35-year-old goalkeeper was the loneliest man on the pitch on Thursday:

The Black and Yellows' collapse is even more baffling considering the game started better than anyone would've dared to hope. It took Dortmund all of nine minutes to get a two-goal advantage that should have been enough to see out the game.

Especially when Marco Reus restored that cushion with his goal in the 57th minute, the tie should have been over. There's no excuse for letting Liverpool back in it at that point.

But Dortmund never looked comfortable, dropping deeper and deeper, with panicky clearances instead of calm build-up play. The Black and Yellows failed to win most of the rebounds from these long balls, as Martin Rafelt of Spielverlagerung.de (link in German) pointed out, and Liverpool kept coming, wave after wave.

Tuchel didn't bring on a midfielder such as Nuri Sahin to calm down the game. Ilkay Gundogan, who was good to go for 45 minutes at the most, as Tuchel told German broadcaster Sport 1 before the game, didn't enter the pitch until the 82nd minute.

At that point, Mamadou Sakho had already equalised the game at 3-3, and there was a sense of inevitability in the air, as Jurgen Klopp noted:

There's no way around it, Dortmund let the occasion get to them, in both legs. Klopp's return to Signal Iduna Park in the first leg almost paralysed the Black and Yellows, while the rowdy Anfield crowd did their part in Liverpool's unlikely comeback on Thursday.

It's surprising, to say the least, that a team playing in front of 80,000 spectators every other week would struggle with a highly emotional game, but that's just what happened, as Tuchel alluded to after the game:

At the end of the day, Dortmund simply didn't deserve to go through to the semi-finals. Giving away five goals to Liverpool in the tie, while looking like headless chickens for the final 30 minutes at Anfield, just isn't good enough.

Now the Black and Yellows, winless in three games for only the second time all season long, need to regroup, with the DFB-Pokal semi-final against Hertha BSC around the corner on Wednesday.

Jon Super/Associated Press

"The interesting thing will be to see how we deal with it as a unit, how much energy it costs us and whether we manage to put the disappointment behind us," said Tuchel after the game.

Seeing as Dortmund will likely need to beat Bayern Munich to hoist the cup—the Bavarian giants host relegation battlers Werder Bremen in the semi-finals—it's difficult to disagree with Hummels, who said after the game, per Spox.com's Jochen Tittmar (h/t Deutsche Welle's Jonathan Harding), that the Europa League "was the most realistic title this season. I thought we would win it."

There would've been no shame in going out against Liverpool in normal fashion. But an epic collapse like this will forever haunt Dortmund.

Lars Pollmann is a Featured Columnist writing on Borussia Dortmund. He also writes for YellowWallPod.com. You can follow him on Twitter.