There is a line that soccer coach Antonio Conte adores but, perhaps for reasons of domestic harmony, tends not to claim as his own. Instead, he credits (or blames) his great friend, veteran sporting director Pantaleo Corvino, for his favorite pearl of sporting wisdom. "You can," the quote goes, "make a mistake with your wife. But you cannot make a mistake with your striker, or your goalkeeper." Conte, for the record, evidently does not have the slightest doubt about his marriage. He and his wife, Elisabetta, have been together for the better part of three decades. His public image might be that of a cold-eyed, hard-nosed taskmaster, but that did not stop him devoting a disarmingly saccharine chapter of his autobiography, "Testa, Cuore e Gambe," to his beloved spouse. Still, in a professional context, Corvino's joke clearly strikes such a chord that Conte has long treated it less as a maxim and more as a motto. It is his avowed belief that he cannot gamble on a striker he does not know, and therefore cannot trust, explaining what has become one of modern soccer's great love affairs: the union between Conte and Romelu Lukaku. At first glance, Conte and Lukaku do not seem like an obvious pairing. Lukaku is fiercely intelligent, independent-minded, occasionally more than a little headstrong. Those are not traits that many coaches in Conte's mold -- disciplinarians, strongmen, sergeant majors -- would ordinarily tolerate, let alone cherish. For much of the past decade, though, Conte and Lukaku do not seem to have been able to stop thinking about each other. They have worked together at two clubs, currently at Napoli, and came close to doing so at a third. Their relationship has come to seem not just reciprocally beneficial, but mutually dependent. Each, for the other, has become something of a lodestar. Napoli, over recent weeks, has squandered a commanding lead at the top of the Serie A table, and now trails Inter by a point. How the season finishes will go a long way to determining how the great love affair between Conte and Lukaku ends. The Italian Conte first tried to sign the Belgian Lukaku while he was at Chelsea, identifying Lukaku as the ideal replacement for Diego Costa in the summer of 2017. It was not to be, the deal falling apart when Chelsea refused to meet the fees demanded by Lukaku's agents. The striker signed for Manchester United instead. Two years later, Conte had more luck. He had returned to Italy by that stage, drawn away from England by a desire to be reunited with his wife and daughter, and taken charge at Inter; signing Lukaku, he told the club's hierarchy, should be its absolute priority. It took a club-record fee to make it happen, but it was worth it. Inter was the Italian champion the next season. In the spring of 2024, Conte found himself contemplating an offer to take charge of Napoli. His previous job, at Tottenham Hotspur, had ended in disappointment and acrimony; he was tempted by the idea of returning once again to Italy, restoring his reputation. He knew, though, that it was a risk. Napoli had limply surrendered its Serie A title. Aurelio De Laurentiis, the club's exacting president, had burned through three coaches in a single season. Napoli's two crown jewels, Victor Osimhen and Khvicha Kvaratskhelia, were both agitating for a move elsewhere. Conte was adamant that he would need trusted lieutenants by his side. His first call was to Lukaku. In truth, the striker had been drifting, too. He had left Inter for Chelsea in 2021 -- not long after Conte had departed the club, unhappy with the board's plan to sell Lukaku, among others, to help ease the burden on its finances -- but the move had soured quickly. He returned to Inter on loan a year later, but he toiled. Eager to prove he could still compete in Europe, he declined the chance to move to Saudi Arabia in the summer of 2023, electing instead to join Roma on a loan deal. That, too, proved an anticlimax. With the season drawing to a close, his options were looking increasingly scarce. And then Conte got in touch. They were in contact throughout the summer, waiting for Napoli to reach an agreement with Chelsea, exchanging messages to reassure each other that they would get the chance to work together once more. For Conte, that was crucial; you cannot, after all, make a mistake with your striker. He knew he could rely on Lukaku, even at 31, to provide the focal point that his team needed. "He is an atypical center-forward," Conte said last summer. "Usually, with that sort of physique, players are slow. But he has great legs, powerful, very fast." But it is just as important that Lukaku "knows how to hold the ball up, exchange it with his more talented teammates, but also knows how to attack the spaces." What Conte prizes above all, though, is Lukaku's personality. "He is a good guy, a good person," Conte said of his protege last summer. "I'd put my hand in the fire for him." Lukaku is no less glowing about the manager he has come to regard as his mentor. Professionally, he is "always attentive to the details, he cares about every movement, every play in defense and attack," he told CRC Radio this year. When Conte left Inter, in 2021, Lukaku wrote him a note to express his gratitude for all he had taught him. He would carry those lessons "for the rest of my career," he said. Conte had "changed me as a player." But he, too, seems to value the personal connection; that is the thing he has not been able to find elsewhere. "I can open up to him on a personal level," he told CRC Radio. He credits Conte with improving his mental strength. "We are so well prepared that you can't make mistakes. This responsibility is something I really enjoy. These things make you a winner." Lukaku has acted as the focal point of Napoli's attack, giving Conte a known quantity on which to build. He has not scored goals in the volumes that he once did, but he has delivered when it mattered. He scored winners against Roma, Juventus, and Atalanta as Napoli seemed to build an irresistible head of steam. Even now that it has dissipated, Conte has shown no signs of impatience, no appetite for removing him from the team. Lukaku has not scored for five games. Conte has been peppered with questions over whether someone else might be a more suitable alternative. But Conte knows him. Conte trusts him. For Conte, as for Lukaku, there is not, and perhaps there has never been, anyone else. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.