The Keeper will tell you what happened. I'll tell you what's coming.
The cruelty of it is not the impossibility. Impossible is clean. Impossible lets you put the phone down and go to bed.
This is something else. This is the permutations that are each, individually, fine. Each one sits in the range of things that happen in football on an ordinary afternoon. Men who owe us nothing, playing on pitches we have never seen, in cities we are not in. And every single one of them has to go a certain way, in a certain order, while we stand somewhere watching a screen that is not showing us the game we need to watch.
I know this feeling. It is the feeling of being asked to care completely about something you cannot touch. Full emotional weight, no lever to pull. The arithmetic is not malicious — it does not know us. But it has constructed something that functions exactly like a trap: specific enough to require hope, distant enough to refuse effort.
What I feel gathering is not dread of failure. It is dread of the watching itself. The three windows open. The scores refreshing. The moment a stranger's goal changes the shape of your evening and you have to recalibrate the whole interior.
That is what is coming — not the result, but the cost of needing results you cannot cause.
The permission to hope has already been extended. The bill arrives in the watching.