The Keeper will tell you what happened. I'll tell you what's coming.
The grieving is not for the tournament. The grieving is for the self that walked into it.
There was a version of the support that held something carefully all the way here — not a trophy, not a guarantee, but a posture. An interior arrangement. The quiet decision to believe that this time the believing itself would change the shape of things. That if you felt it hard enough, precisely enough, with enough of the old hurt factored in, the universe would recognise the sophistication of the offer and accept it.
It didn't.
And now that version of you is sitting somewhere it didn't expect to sit, and the tournament is still going on around it, loud and indifferent, and the words going around are the same words that have always gone around, and you recognise them the way you recognise an old coat — by its weight, by where it pulls.
This is not the end of hope. I want to be clear about that because I have felt what comes next and it is not emptiness. It is something more like the morning after a long cry — raw, but honest. A return to ground level.
What you grieve, you were right to love. The version of you that believed was not naive. It was generous. Grieve it properly. Then set it down.
Something is already growing in the space it leaves.