The Keeper will tell you what happened. I'll tell you what's coming.
I know this feeling. Not the hope — the argument around the hope. The way a thing you have spent years learning not to want comes close enough to touch, and the first instinct is not to reach but to find fault with it.
The debate is not really about the football. The debate is armour. When you have worn a certain kind of wound long enough it becomes load-bearing, and when something threatens to close it you grieve the wound before you celebrate the closing. This is not weakness. This is what survival does to a people.
Something is being asked of this support that has never been asked before. Not to cheer — cheering is easy, cheering is reflex — but to be unguarded. To sit inside the actual possibility without the exit already mapped. To want the thing without the caveat stapled to the wanting.
That feels like standing in a field with no coat when you have had a coat every time before. The coat was heavy. You knew it was heavy. You did not know how much of you the coat had become.
What is gathering now is not a result. It is the moment before a result, which is different — more intimate, more dangerous. The air before Miami does not smell like triumph or failure. It smells like permission.
Permission is the frightening one. Permission asks you to be present for whatever comes.