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Alicia Ferguson blinks back tears as she looks up into the harsh sun above Giants Stadium in New Jersey, USA.
It's 1999, and the 17-year-old is standing shoulder-to-shoulder with some of her Matildas heroes like Julie Murray, Cheryl Salisbury, Bridgette Starr, Anissa Tann, Alison Forman, Lisa Casagrande.
She takes a deep breath as "Advance Australia Fair" trumpets around the red stands where almost 30,000 people sit watching them. Watching her.
She still can't quite believe she's here. She barely slept the night before after head coach Greg Brown told her she'd be making her World Cup debut; she hadn't played a minute of the first two group games against Ghana and Sweden, and certainly didn't expect to do so in this final match against China.
But now here she is, croaking and quivering her way through the anthem in the baking New Jersey sun, about to face one of the world's best teams. She's overcome with pride, with adrenaline, and with nerves.
"The occasion and the emotion attached to it got to me a lot, I think," Ferguson-Cook tells ABC Sport, 25 years on.
"We'd played against China previously, and at that point, they were an exceptional team. Kept possession really well, nice technical skills, stuff like that.
"And Brown was telling us before the game: we've got to impose ourselves on them physically, we've got to get stuck in, break up their play, get in their faces.
"So I had in my head: I need to try and get stuck in and win the ball.
"But that's not quite what happened."
The whistle blows. China kicks off. The first minute is a flurry of panicked passes as both teams feel each other out.
A nervous touch from Tann is almost pounced upon by a rushing Chinese attacker, but the centre-back slides in and clears the ball upfield just in time.
Ferguson, playing on the right wing, stretches out a leg to block a long pass from her opposing defender, Bai Lei. The noise of the crowd swells around her; the incessant, rhythmic beating of drums from somewhere in the stands pounding in her ears.
She glimpses herself on the stadium's huge screen which showed ads for Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Coca-Cola during the warm-ups. It feels like the eyes of the entire world are on her. She wants to make her mark; do something special that she will be remembered for forever.
Another 30 seconds pass, and a Chinese midfielder pokes the ball backwards towards Bai. The left-back takes a stride towards it, shaping her body to pass the ball to her team-mate upfield.
That's when it happens. The moment described by some as 'the worst tackle in women's football history'.
As Bai attempts the pass, Ferguson slides in with her left boot, colliding with the defender's lower standing leg with such force that it sends her spinning head-first into the grass.
"It was a terribly mistimed challenge; I genuinely thought I could get the ball, but looking back, I was at least a yard or two away from it," she says.
"There was definitely no malice in it. I was absolutely caught up in the moment and the occasion of the game. It was the adrenaline rush.
"When Sandy, the referee, ran over, I just remember her saying: 'you're off!'
"And I think there's a photo of me with my hands out and looking up at the red card. It was a bit of a surreal moment."
As China's medical staff rush onto the field with a stretcher, Ferguson walks slowly towards the sideline. Consumed by shock and embarrassment, she's barely able to lift her gaze to face the thousands of Chinese fans glaring down at her.
It was just the fourth straight-red card shown in Women's World Cup history, and to this day, remains the fastest ever given.
"I looked at the clock as I was walking off, and it was at about 1 minute 35 [seconds]," she says.
"All I could think of as I was walking off was: 'don't cry until you get off the field. Don't cry.' Because I was literally on the verge of tears."
As soon as she crosses the white line and into in the outstretched arm of a staff member, Ferguson bursts into tears, tugging in desperation at her barely-worn jersey.
The sideline microphones capture her final shrieking insult to herself as she throws herself onto the bench, hiding her face in her shirt: "Idiot!"
"I didn't stop crying for the whole game, so I went back into the changing room," she says.
"There was actually a Chinese fan, as I was going down the tunnel, who yelled out to me: 'go home, number 13! Go home!'
"That made me cry more. Our sports psychologist came in with me because I wasn't in a great state. I was kicking things and I was throwing things. It wasn't an enjoyable moment. I basically thought I'd let my family down, I'd let my teammates down.
"I was just so embarrassed and disappointed and angry with myself that I'd actually done that."
Meanwhile, Bai had somehow returned to the field and played out the rest of the game, despite the fact that she had what would these days be classified as a concussion requiring an immediate substitution.
"All I can remember was I flew up in the air and landed with my head down, with a sound of 'bang,' and then I knew nothing," she told The Athletic in 2019.
"When I woke up, I was already off the pitch. I opened my eyes and saw stars and diamonds in front of me. I wanted to touch them with my hands.
"I stood up and felt a bit dizzy. Coach Ma Yuanan asked me whether I could carry on playing the game, and I answered that I wanted to try."
Bai's concussion was so serious that she didn't even remember she'd played the full 90 minutes at all.
"When the game finished, we went to dinner and I felt dizzy, uncomfortable, a little bit gross and unable to eat," she said.
"It's funny that I didn't even know she was sent off after that foul before my teammates told me at dinner.
"The second day for me was still dizzy. My head buzzed and the medical diagnosis was a slight cerebral concussion. After three months, it was recovered, and now it has basically no influence on me."
Ferguson stayed in the dressing room until half-time, but hearing her teammates clipping down the tunnel towards her, she quickly exited the room and hid somewhere beneath the stadium so she didn't have to face them.
Australia went on to lose 3-1, having to play effectively the entire game with 10 players, while China made it all the way to the final where they lost to hosts USA on penalties.
After full-time, Ferguson took herself off to the very back corner of the team bus, not saying a word.
"There was a moment on the bus when Browny was sitting up the front, and there was this booming laughter," she says.
"He'd watched the footage back and was then taking the piss, saying 'f---ing hell, Eesh, you really caught her!'
"A couple of my teammates were like, 'mate, it was so hot out there and you left us with 10 players' and I was like, 'I know! I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry.' That's all I kept saying.
"I think everyone was fine, but they also knew I needed some space. There's not much you can say in that moment. So I just went back to my room, me and Amy Wilson, and we ordered pizza and ate lots of Oreos and listened to the Backstreet Boys."
You would think that experiencing such a mortifying moment on the world stage would be enough to send anyone into a spiral of anxiety and depression, let alone someone who'd only just turned 17.
But Ferguson says her record-breaking red card was 'one of the best things that happened' to her in her footballing career, and a moment she now reflects on with lightness and humour.
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"It made me immediately change the way I approached football — to take the emotion out of it and just focus on the process rather than the outcome," she says.
"Even the night before, I was a striker, right? So I was thinking about scoring an amazing goal, but I wasn't thinking about how I was going to score that amazing goal. I was thinking about the occasion and the final product rather than how to get there.
"It definitely helped me to approach football games as games, and not as occasions. It was a pretty harsh lesson to learn at that age, but it helped me mature very, very quickly.
"I was never going to hold any records for scoring goals or doing anything else extraordinary in the game. So it's a point of difference; it's a talking-point of difference."
Indeed, as a new member of the Matildas, Ferguson didn't have much time to dwell on what had happened: she had the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games to prepare for the next year, in what was the start of a decade-long national team career.
For the 2023 Women's World Cup, Ferguson-Cook will be Australia's "head of delegation", accompanying the Matildas across the country and as deep into the tournament as they can go, passing on the big-stage lessons she herself learned the hard way.
"I had two choices: I could let it bother me, or I could just crack on and get on with it," she says.
"People make mistakes, but it's how you react to them, isn't it?
"I found the positive in that experience. It was horrible at the time, but it actually made me a more mature player and a better player in the long run, because it changed my whole mentality and approach.
"I'm so excited for these players to be playing on home soil, because they spend so much time away from their friends and families. It was a big deal playing in a World Cup in front of 30,000 people in America; that was a big deal for us. But these girls do it week in, week out."