Paris Saint-Germain have missed out on Champions League glory again after their defeat to Borussia Dortmund, and Kylian Mbappe will leave the club this summer

Kylian Mbappe's face at the end said it all. Although it was a daft question to be fair.

Just moments after what will be the final Champions League game of his seven-year career with Paris Saint-Germain before this summer's much vaunted move to Real Madrid, the forward was asked who he'd prefer to win Wednesday's semi-final between his future employers and Bayern Munich.

There was a pause, a roll of the eyes and swift exit. In truth it was quite calm and measured in the circumstances.

Moments earlier Mbappe had been kicking the Parisian turf in frustration and gazing over at Borussia Dortmund's gleeful players, through to a Champions League final at Wembley after a two-legged affair of 44 shots and no goals for their opponents, with the woodwork hit six times.

It was a classic smash and grab, albeit an intelligent one. When you've got the pace of Karim Adeyemi in attack, the energy of Julian Brandt and Marcel Sabitzer in midfield and the magnet-to-a-ball qualities of Mats Hummels and Nico Schlotterbeck in defence then you are tough nut to crack, and whoever faces Dortmund in the final will discover that.

There will be no showpiece for PSG though after another season of failure on the European stage, with Luis Enrique the seventh manager appointed by Qatar Sports Investments since they took over the club in 2011. European magnificence hasn't found any of them.

For the QSI frontman Nasser Al-Khelaifi the Champions League remains an elusive dream, with the closest he got to it - bar a front row seat for every fancy UEFA gala - coming in Lisbon's empty Stadium of Light in the 2020 final when Thomas Tuchel's side fell short. The German would win it a year later with Chelsea, and is a step away from the final now.

And it would also be no surprise if Mbappe got closer to the European trophy prized above all others once he moves on too, with that much vaunted departure having to spell the end of a cycle for Al-Khelaifi and PSG.

We are of course still less than a year on from the exits of both Lionel Messi and Neymar, both within around a month of each other and both designed to free up the funds to keep Mbappe - so close to Madrid last year - around for a bit longer.

The big hope was that superstar power would be enough to drag PSG to the Champions League, but they would always fall short. Bayern comfortably dispatched them in the last-16 last season, Real Madrid mounted one of their comebacks to knock them out the year before and it was Man City's turn in the semis the year before that.

Under Al-Khelaifi's leadership each and every year it is some team or other's turn to bloody the noses of the big-spending Parisians. A more well-coached one, a hungrier one or a frankly better one will seemingly always pass them in the end.

In fairness though this defeat can be seen as somewhat different given the makeup of the PSG side these days. Perhaps Ousmane Dembele aside - he was called "terrible" on TNT Sports - there is a largely hungry core there even if Mbappe has seen and done it all already, except this.

With him gone the focus should shift to the likes of Warren Zaire-Emery, Bradley Barcola, Lucas Beraldo and Nuno Mendes. Goncalo Ramos had an off night against Dortmund but he's still the firebrand forward who made us laugh our heads off when he came in for a livid Cristiano Ronaldo and scored a Portugal hat-trick at the World Cup, where Randal Kolo Muani, curiously unused by Enrique against Dortmund, shone for France.

These are players PSG can build upon, and a focus should shift towards developing superstars rather than simply shipping them in for exorbitant fees and hoping they would come together on the pitch.

That isn't really how the best sides operate these days, and let it never be forgotten that Real Madrid didn't win a Champions League for 12 years between 2002 and 2014, a period that spanned their first and much of their second 'Galactico' era.

PSG and Al-Khelaifi only have a lot of Ligue 1 titles to show for theirs, but with Mbappe's roll of the eyes that era has disappeared. The focus now should be on building a team that prioritises nous over names, that's if they are at all serious about this business of course.