The Keeper will tell you what happened. I'll tell you what's coming.
This is what hope feels like when it has been taken outside and left there.
Not hope as a feeling you hold. Hope as something you set down — on unfamiliar ground, in another country's weather — and then you go inside, because there is nothing else to do, and you wait for morning. That is where we are now. The thing is out there. We have no hands on it.
I have been trying to find the word for what it is to want something urgently in a room where your wanting does not count. It is not helplessness — helplessness is passive, and this is alive, this is bright with attention, every nerve turned outward toward stadia we are not in. It is exposure. We have made ourselves entirely available to an outcome that will be decided without us.
Strangers will play. They will be motivated by things that have nothing to do with us. The ball will move across grass we will never touch, and somewhere in that movement our fate will be resolved by people who will not think of us once.
And still we will watch. Still we will need it.
This is not optimism. Optimism has a logic. This is older than logic — the way you check for the thing in the morning not because you believe it survived, but because you cannot stop yourself from needing to know.