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The boos are already flooding around the stands of Melbourne Rectangular Stadium as referee Stéphanie Frappart whistles the game to a pause and points a finger to her ear.
Hayley Raso is slowing to a walk, having sprinted off towards the sideline moments earlier, eyes closed, carried by the roaring wave of the crowd after arrowing the ball into the net's far corner.
The rumbling boos turn to piercing jeers as the VAR checks and rechecks something we cannot see: all of us crammed into this cauldron of colour and clamour outraged by the interruption to Raso's moment in the sun.
Frappart holds up a hand and speaks into the microphone wrapped around her cheek and puts the bright yellow whistle to her lips.
27,000 people hold their breaths as she traces an invisible square in the air and waits, like an actor on a stage about to deliver an opening soliloquy.
The goal stands. Raso falls to her knees and holds her arms wide. Her Matildas teammates throw themselves around her as the crowd throws its noise back onto the pitch.
Barely 10 minutes have passed and Australia is 1-0 up and suddenly the night is trembling with possibility.
This is how it feels to be a Matildas fan: always teetering on the edge of something, but never knowing exactly which way they — or you — will fall.
That has been the feeling of Australia's Women's World Cup campaign so far — this precarious teetering, like a knife balanced on the tip of a finger.
Perhaps it is the vertigo created by their circumstances: after a nervous 1-0 win over Republic of Ireland and a disastrous 3-2 loss to Nigeria, they started this tournament as a favourite but were edging ever closer to making one of their earliest-ever exits.
In neither of those games did Australia look convincing. In neither of them did they look like the team we know them to be when it counts. When would that team show up, we asked? That team of fight and fire? That team that never says die?
We saw it briefly, in the final 10 minutes against Nigeria. At 3-1 down, the game already squared away, the Matildas remembered who they were and threw themselves at their opponents.
They clawed a goal back in that furious frenzy but, by the time the whistle blew, they already had one foot in the grave they'd dug for themselves.
In both of those games, something was missing. The easiest answer, the biggest void, was Sam Kerr: the captain's calf injury had occupied headlines for the past two weeks, as though the team's entire destiny rested on her lower leg muscles.
That was not an unwarranted anxiety. In the first two games, the team, at times, looked lost. Hesitant, uncertain, directionless: without the triangulation provided by their striker, doubt gave way to full-blown scepticism that Australia would be able to achieve very much at this tournament without her.
In the days leading up to the final group game against Canada, the tension grew thicker, heavier, sludgier. Nobody I asked could say with any certainty which way this game would go; which way this team would fall. Nobody dared to have hope — just in case heartbreak followed.
Canada are no pushovers, after all: they're Olympic champions, with some of the best players in the world, and required just a point to make it to the knock-outs. And they had football's all-time international goal scorer Christine Sinclair, in her potential last hurrah, with a young and hungry team desperate to make her proud.
They had their own weighty stakes, just as the Matildas did.
The difference, in the end, was which team was able to rise to their moment, and which one crumpled beneath it.
And it started in the ninth minute, when Hayley Raso dug the ball from beneath her feet and speared it through red legs and into the back of the whipping, bulging net.
For all of us on the outside, that seemed to signal something then: a kind of taunt, a throwing down, a declaration of war.
Come on, she seemed to say: come at us. Meet us here, where we are now, in the heat of this. Let's see who is willing to risk it all, to be brave, to light the fire.
Canada tried. They muscled and manoeuvred, harried and harassed. Adrianna Leon made some darts down the wing, Sinclair made some touch-ons through the middle. Long balls from Jessie Fleming hung tantalisingly in the air.
Yet none seemed to come close. Even when Matildas goalkeeper Mackenzie Arnold was required, in the deep stages of the second half, sticking out a stiff right foot or a strong open palm, it just never felt like Canada were in it.
As the game barrelled on and Australia scored again and again, these hopeless red figures were swept up in an aqua-blue rip-tide, trying to keep their chins above the waterline.
It wasn't just the goals, either. Every tackle, every pass, every block, every challenge: the Matildas were carried by something else, some kind of energy, the thing they had been missing.
And it wasn't Kerr. Although the captain had been declared fit enough to play, her role on Monday was just another member of the team, fading onto the bench in a brown substitute bib, ferrying baskets of blue water bottles across the coaches' box to her teammates.
Because as much as the narrative has framed her in this way lately, Sam Kerr is not the Matildas, and the Matildas are not Sam Kerr.
The Matildas are Caitlin Foord sprinting down the left wing, her legs and arms flailing, using every atom of herself to reach whatever ball is placed in her path.
The Matildas are Mary Fowler suffocating Canada's midfield, pouncing on the ball that skittles out from the fray, looking up into the green space beyond and running.
The Matildas are Kyra Cooney-Cross wriggling her way out of a three-person press or stinging the palms of Canada's goalkeeper with a bullet from 40 yards.
The Matildas are Steph Catley gathering her teammates into small huddles and gesturing directions, the captain's armband sitting ever more firmly on her skin.
The Matildas are Katrina Gorry sliding feet-first across the grass to scoop the ball out of a Canadian's stride before bouncing back up and sending it long
The Matildas are Clare Hunt, all of eight caps, launching herself into the cool Melbourne night to contest balls in the air and winning almost every time.
The Matildas are the team who showed up on Monday night with fight and with fire: this blood rush, this heart thump, this gasp and tremble and roar.
This team you cannot look away from; this team you don't want to miss because you know you're missing something more than football.
This group of players who can take you to the very edge of belief and pull you right back again, all in the space of a few delirious days, a few miraculous minutes.
"Tonight was more than 90 minutes of football," head coach Tony Gustavsson said afterwards.
"I think it represents so much more of what the Matildas stand for and what they want to do in terms of inspiring and uniting people.
"Everything from connecting with former Matildas alumni with their 'never say die' attitude to the fans that back them up and believed in the team, even though there was a lot of question and criticism after the last game.
"Someone asked about this being a crossroad moment or a defining moment for me or the team [...] this team have proven time after time with that 'never say die' attitude that they can come in big when it's needed most.
"We know we might not have the best team on paper. We know we might not have the top players in the top clubs in the top leagues. But we have something else that no one can take away from this team, and that's the identity and DNA and belief that lives in it."
It's past midnight and I'm walking down the Yarra River, which drifts low and flat and silent beneath a clear bright moon.
Melbourne has emptied now, real life creeping back into this World Cup fever dream. The green-and-yellow lights of the city shimmer on the surface of the water, as though born from the depths of the river itself.
There will be questions about tactics and substitutions and fitness and futures to come, I'm sure. Opponents will only get bigger and harder from here, and these players' bodies have already taken a battering.
But for now, tonight, we have this: Hayley Raso closing her eyes, Mary Fowler's smile beaming wide, Steph Catley leaping into the night.
The sound of 27,000 people launching themselves from their seats and roaring with one voice, intoxicated by this team of players who started the night alone but ended it wrapped in the belief of the nation.
This feeling of teetering on the edge of something.
We have finally seen who the Matildas are. And it feels like anything is possible.