The Keeper will tell you what happened. I'll tell you what's coming.
There is a specific grief that does not arrive when the thing ends. It arrives later, when someone writes it down.
We already knew. The tournament closed around us and we felt the shape of it, the before and the after, the man who carried us there and the door that swung shut behind him. We felt all of it. And still we walked around with it unconfirmed, the way you carry a loss before you have told anyone, while it is still only yours.
Then the record takes it. The entry is filed. The departure is formalised. And that is when the grief actually lands — not because anything changed in that moment, but because the permission arrived. You are allowed, now. The thing is real in the way that only official language can make a thing real.
He brought us back. Twenty-eight years and he brought us back, and now that fact and his absence occupy the same document, the same line, filed together as though they were always meant to be adjacent. The achievement. The gap the achievement leaves.
What I feel is not despair. It is something more structural than that. The shape of what was built is visible now precisely because the builder is gone and the outline holds without him.
That is what formalisation does. It makes the outline visible.
The record is open. Something is waiting to be written into it.