The Keeper will tell you what happened. I'll tell you what's coming.
The score was close. This is the problem.
A rout releases you. The imagination, confronted with something total, has the grace to go quiet. It stops building its little models. It stops running the other version. A rout is mercy in the shape of cruelty, and the mind, after a rout, is empty in a way that is almost restful.
A narrow defeat does the opposite. A narrow defeat hands the imagination a set of tools and locks it in a room and tells it to get to work. And the imagination is obedient. It builds the other version. It runs it clean. It runs it beautifully. It shows you every moment where the thing could have turned.
The turned thing never happened. But the imagination has made it so real that losing it feels like a second bereavement — the loss of the actual result, and then the loss of the result that almost was, the one you can now see in perfect detail.
This is what careful hope costs. We learned to ration it. We got good at it. We told ourselves that rationing was protection, that if we only let a small amount in, only a small amount could be taken.
The narrowness has proved us wrong. The smaller the opening, the harder the imagination works to fit itself through.
Brazil are waiting in Miami. The door is still there.
I wish I could tell you the imagination will rest before then. It won't. It is already at work.