Promotion football does two things to a football club at the same time. It fills the ground and it fills the phones.
Graystone's official account gains eleven thousand followers in the six days after the play-off draw is confirmed. Most of the new arrivals are not there for Graystone. They are there for one name, and the algorithm knows it before the fans do.
@SantosWatch: "Conwell City want Marco Santos. Now word is a Premier League club has made contact too. Two teams. One play-off campaign left to get through first. Buckle up."
The second team is Riverport United. Nobody official confirms it. A photographer catches one of their scouts in the away end at Graystone's last league match of the season, and that is enough. By Monday it is a story. By Wednesday it is the only story.
Patrick fields the calls now, all of them, because Marco has stopped answering numbers he doesn't recognise. Patrick's phone doesn't stop for two days.
Rico watches him take a call in the kitchen, standing very still by the window, saying mostly nothing, the way people negotiate when they already know what they are and are not willing to say out loud.
The club schedules a press conference three days before the semi-final first leg. Briggs takes the first ten minutes. Injuries, team news, the size of the occasion. Then a reporter near the front asks the question the room has been waiting to ask, and asks it of Marco directly.
REPORTER: "Marco — Conwell City, and now reports of Premier League interest. Can you tell us anything about your future?"
Marco has practised this answer in his head for three nights, in the dark, staring at a ceiling. It comes out flatter than he rehearsed it, which is somehow better.
MARCO: "Nothing's concrete. There's nothing signed, nothing agreed, nothing I can talk about because there's nothing there to talk about. It's speculation."
REPORTER: "But you don't deny the interest."
MARCO: "I don't control what other clubs say or don't say. I control what I do here. Right now that's the play-offs. That's it. That's the whole answer."
REPORTER: "And after the play-offs?"
MARCO: "After the play-offs, I'll answer that question. Today isn't after the play-offs."
It is not a dramatic answer. It is not even, on its own, a very interesting one. It becomes the most quoted thing said by anyone at the club all season.
@FutebolPuro: "'Today isn't after the play-offs.' Marco Santos giving nothing away and somehow saying everything. This man learned from the best."
@GraystoneUltras: "Whatever happens after — right now he's ours. Focused on us. That's all we needed to hear."
The banner appears at the semi-final first leg, home end, unfolded in the twenty-third minute for no reason anyone can identify except that four thousand people have been thinking the same thing for a week and somebody finally brought the paint.
DON'T GO. NOT YET.
Marco sees it during the warm-up. He doesn't say anything about it to anyone. He also doesn't take his eyes off it for a good three seconds longer than the stretching routine requires.
Patrick finds him after training two days later, in the corridor, the same corridor, the way Patrick always seems to find him in corridors when the news is the kind that shouldn't wait for a kitchen table.
PATRICK: "Both of them want an answer before the transfer window opens. Conwell first, but Riverport's come in harder than I expected. They're not interested in queueing behind anybody."
MARCO: "Okay."
PATRICK: "That's it? Okay?"
MARCO: "What do you want me to say, Patrick?"
PATRICK: "I want you to understand that clubs like this don't wait forever. Somebody blinks first eventually, and it's usually the player who thought he had more time than he did."
MARCO: "I heard you."
PATRICK: "Marco —"
MARCO: "Nothing. Until after the play-offs. I told the cameras that and I'm telling you the same thing, because it's true both times."
Patrick looks at him for a long moment. Something in his face that isn't quite frustration. Closer to recognising a version of himself he hasn't seen in a while.
PATRICK: "You know that's not how any of them will read it."
MARCO: "I don't care how they read it. I've waited a long time to play football that matters. I'm not spending it thinking about a phone call."
Patrick nods, slowly, and doesn't push again.
PATRICK: "Fine. After the play-offs."
The semi-final is not pretty. Graystone beat Halton Town 2–0 at home, lose the away leg 1–0, go through 2–1 on aggregate on a night so tense that Rico, watching from the stands for the first time all season, spends the final ten minutes standing with both hands pressed flat against the seat in front of him, not sitting down once.
Marco plays every minute of both legs. Briggs does not mention Conwell, Riverport, or anything beyond the next ball, and neither does anyone in the dressing room, not out loud, not where it could be heard.
The final is set. Graystone against Castleford Rovers — the same Castleford who beat them 2–0 in August, back when Marco's name was still just a name in a squad list nobody outside the club could place. One match. Winner up. Loser back to try again next year.
THE FINAL
The National Stadium holds eighty thousand people and on the day of the play-off final it holds close enough to all of them, split almost evenly down the middle, noise arriving in waves that don't fully stop even when the ball goes out of play.
Rico is in the stand behind the goal. He has not told Marco he would be watching from there specifically. He simply is.
Castleford are the better side for the opening half hour, patient, comfortable, working the ball through midfield with the calm of a team that has done this before and Graystone, for the most part, have not. It stays goalless. Just.
Four minutes into the second half, Castleford's winger cuts inside from the right and drives a low cross across the six-yard box, and for a moment there is nobody there to meet it except the striker arriving at the far post with the goal at his mercy and Marco, sprinting across from the near side, closing distance he has no business closing, gets a boot to it a full stride before the striker does and sends it behind for a corner that comes to absolutely nothing.
The stand behind the goal exhales as one body.
Rico does not shout. He puts both hands over his face for a second, then takes them away, and says nothing to the strangers around him, because there is nothing that needs saying.
The corner is cleared. The half settles again.
In the seventy-ninth minute, Castleford break with two against one their striker and a late-arriving midfielder against Marco alone, Hadley caught upfield after a set piece that went wrong. It is the kind of moment a defender either survives or doesn't, and there is no version of survival that looks calm from the outside.
Marco does not commit. He backs off, angles his body to cut the pass rather than the man, forces the striker wide toward the touchline where the angle narrows and the danger with it. The midfielder calls for the ball. The striker holds it a half-second too long, weighing the pass against the shot, and by the time he decides, Marco has closed the space that decision needed. The cross comes in low, behind everyone, and rolls out for a goal kick that means nothing on a stat sheet and means the difference between a final that is still alive and one that isn't.
Briggs, on the touchline, claps twice. It is the loudest praise anyone has seen him give all season.
The match goes to the ninetieth minute at nil-nil. Four minutes of stoppage time are added.
In the second of those four minutes, Graystone win a loose ball thirty-five yards from Castleford's goal nothing, a header that falls kindly, a scramble that shouldn't produce anything and it breaks to Marco, alone, no options ahead of him, the kind of ball a centre-back is supposed to play safe and sideways and let someone else decide what happens next.
He doesn't.
He takes one touch to set it. Nobody closes him down fast enough the whole stadium, Castleford included, braced for a cross that never comes. He strikes it clean, with the outside of his boot and it is not a shot that looks like much for the first half-second of its flight, until it starts to bend.
It climbs, and dips, and beats the keeper who gets a hand to it and gets nothing else, the ball already past his fingertips before his feet have finished moving and goes in off the underside of the bar, hard enough that it takes a full second for anyone, Marco included, to be certain it has actually crossed the line.
Marco does not run anywhere in particular. He turns, arms out, and is buried within three seconds by every teammate close enough to reach him, a pile of bodies on the halfway line that the referee eventually has to physically break apart so the match can restart.
There is barely time to restart it. The whistle goes seconds later.
Graystone. 1–0. Promoted.
He finds Rico afterward the way he always finds Rico afterward, cutting through security who have stopped trying to stop him days ago, and for a moment neither of them says anything at all, because there isn't a sentence built yet that fits.
RICO: "Thirty yards."
MARCO: "I wasn't aiming for thirty yards. I was aiming for the goal."
RICO: "Same thing, from where I was sitting."
Patrick reaches them last, out of breath, having come the long way round.
PATRICK: "Two clubs are about to call me within the hour."
MARCO: "Let them."
PATRICK: "You're smiling."
MARCO: "It's after the play-offs."
And then you hear it thousands of fans chanting
"Marco! Marco! Marco!"
Somewhere in the stand behind the goal, someone is still holding up a banner that no longer quite fits what just happened. DON'T GO. NOT YET. Marco doesn't see it this time. He's too busy being carried, briefly, by four teammates who have wanted to do that to somebody all season and finally have a reason.
END OF CHAPTER 31