The match was everything he had known it would be and, in the way of things known from a distance and then experienced in full, considerably more.
He had seen it — known its shape, its arc, its ending. The knowledge did not prepare him for the specific experience of watching 170-160 unfold in real time, in a stadium of a hundred thousand people, the way a match felt when two sides had both decided to make it exceptional.
The Irish opened with the kind of display that communicated, without subtlety, that they had come prepared to play. Moran's first goal came in forty seconds — the stadium barely settled — the shot placed with the calm precision of a Chaser who had decided that the Bulgarians' keeper would move left and had been correct. The Bulgarian response was immediate and organized, three passes in six seconds, Dimitrov pulling the score back before the crowd had finished reacting to the first. The tempo set in that first minute held for most of the match: Irish possession, Bulgarian pressure, the specific quality of two sides who understood each other's patterns well enough to have prepared specifically for them.
Krum was extraordinary. He had known this too and it was still extraordinary — the patience of him, mostly, which was not what photographs and reports conveyed. The Wronski Feint came in the second hour when the score was tied at 130, and it was performed not as a maneuver but as a statement: the dive precise, the pull-out later than anyone had any business pulling out, the Bulgarian reserve keeper below him on the ground before Krum had fully levelled. The stadium's noise reached a quality that was not quite sound. Harry was on his feet beside him, had been on his feet for the last hour without appearing to notice he had stood up, his face with the expression Ron had come to recognize as Harry at the edge of what he could contain.
He took no photographs during the match. Some things were not improved by the frame.
The second half tightened. Ireland pushed their lead to 160-130 in a run of four goals across twenty minutes, the Chasers finding a rhythm that the Bulgarian defense could not disrupt cleanly, the Quaffle movement so fast that the crowd tracking it lost it twice and had to find it again. The Bulgarian response was measured rather than panicked — the composure of a side that had been behind before and understood that a match was not finished until the Snitch was caught. Ron watched the Bulgarian bench during the Irish run and noted the quality of how they communicated — quiet, rapid, specific — and thought: that is a well-coached team.
Then Krum found the Snitch.
It was in the upper section of the Bulgarian end, barely moving, the small gold glint of it against the evening sky, and Krum was the only player in the stadium who had seen it. He moved at the speed he moved, which was the speed that had produced the Feint and which was simply what Viktor Krum was when he had decided to go somewhere, and he took it.
Ireland won 170-160. The Snitch caught in a losing cause, which was not a contradiction — it was the decision of someone who understood that there were different ways to lose a match and had chosen the one consistent with having played it fully. The stadium resolved into the specific noise of something that had been brilliant and was now over.
He bought Ireland souvenirs on the way out, moving through the post-match crowd with the easy efficiency of someone who had a list and knew the stalls. He bought Harry an Irish Seeker's jersey because Harry would be too absorbed in watching Krum's lines to have thought about it. He bought his mother a small enchanted pennant that moved in a private internal breeze — the kind of thing she would put in the kitchen and pretend was merely decorative. He bought Ginny a set of match figurines, the whole Irish starting line-up in miniature, because she had been keeping a mental catalogue of Irish Quidditch statistics since she was ten and would appreciate the completeness. For his father he found a programme — not the standard one, but the official collector's edition with the full statistical record of every World Cup since 1473, which he knew Arthur would read in two days and then shelve in the section he maintained for things he wanted to be able to find again.
For the twins he bought nothing, because they had already acquired several items by methods he had decided not to investigate.
For Hermione, he found a leather-bound edition of the Official Tournament Records going back four centuries, sold by a wizarding historical press with a small stand near the exit. He had been looking for it since he read about the press in the programme on the way in. She found him at the stand reading the index with the quality she had when she arrived somewhere and found him already there.
'You were looking for this,' she said.
'I found it,' he said, and paid for two copies.
She took hers with the expression she had when something had arrived that she intended to use, and tucked it under her arm, and they moved with the crowd back toward the tents in the August evening, the stadium still making the particular residual noise of a hundred thousand people carrying something excellent home with them.