The whistle went, and the world split in half.
Prrrrp.
France ran. The whole of them tore away to my right toward one corner, players and substitutes and doctors folding into a single shape, and behind that goal 3 tiers of blue came up at once.
RRRRAAAAAAAA.
The cannons on the tunnel roof fired again and filled the black with paper.
Whump. Whump.
"Allez les Bleus! Allez les Bleus!"
And in front of me, on the grass I had ordered them out onto, 11 men in green went down where they stood, and stayed down.
I moved.
I had already half turned toward my own bench, because that is what I do at the end of a final. I turn and I find Bray and I take his head in both hands and I say something stupid in his ear. My body had started doing it before the rest of me had been told.
He was on the lip of the dugout with his hands over the back of his neck and the rain coming off his elbows, and he did not look up.
"Give me a minute, Danny," he said, before I got a word out.
