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Years from now, when someone asks you to tell the story of the night the Matildas made World Cup history, what will you say?
Which parts will you remember most vividly? Which parts will you forget? Which parts have crashed and swirled and fused together, lost in the rush of 120 delirious minutes, where we all clung to our seats and to our sanity as we tried to survive the hurricane of this thing?
Where do you even begin to tell the story of the France game?
Maybe you start with the setting; yes, the setting. Something concrete that takes you into the world. That is how a good story often starts.
Perhaps, like me, you were one of the 49,000 people who made their way to Brisbane Stadium on that warm Saturday afternoon, trickling out of houses and hotels and embarking on that sacred pilgrimage towards the Caxton Street intersection, lured by the beat of distant drums, watching the streets slowly fill with rivers of gold.
Or perhaps you were one of thousands more who gathered elsewhere around Australia — in parks and in pubs, on planes and around stadiums — eyes turned to a single screen illuminated in the fading light, surrounded by strangers who would soon become friends as you rode the highs and lows of a moment in Australian sporting history that you had never experienced but always dreamed about.
Or perhaps you were one of millions more who sat at home, nails dug into couch cushions or nibbled between trembling teeth, draped in scarves and wrapped in flags, watching the Matildas tear apart everything you thought you knew about football and taking it to places you never imagined it could go.
Maybe you could talk about the characters then: this cast ripped from the pages of fiction or fantasy, driven by revenge and desire, by passion and pride.
Two teams, Australia and France, caught between the tug of their pasts and the pull of their futures. Two teams who have never quite fulfilled the potential they've always had, driven by the faith that they always could.
Two nations led by two iconic captains — one who has been on the pitch the whole time, the other who hasn't — but both of them colliding once they were in each other's orbit, the heavy gravity of each warping and bending space and time around them.
Other characters emerging from beneath their shadows: Selma Bacha tearing down the left, Élisa De Almeida shutting down the right, Grace Geyoro prowling through the middle, Kadidiatou Diani lurking everywhere else.
Mary Fowler appearing and disappearing, Kyra Cooney-Cross twisting and turning and falling, Clare Hunt muscling and manoeuvring, Katrina Gorry barrelling about. Caitlin Foord and Hayley Raso flattened and pushed to the margins.
Maybe you could talk about why, about the actual football. But which part? There was so much of it. Games within games: years poured into hours, minutes, seconds.
The teams mirrored each other in form and style, pressing and counter-pressing, forcing each other wide and not through, wrestling each other for control of an uncontrollable middle. They used similar tactics, similar formations. Tried to let each other have the ball for a bit, realised that was bad, and tried to wrench it back.
But are those the bits we'll remember?
Probably not. We'll remember the way time slowed down as Alanna Kennedy shanked her clearance into the air, watching it spin in a wormhole as it fell onto the foot of Diani and fizzed past the far post.
We'll remember the way time sped up as the corner ball swung inwards towards the young French centre-back Maëlle Lakrar, who shinned it over the crossbar in surprise.
We'll remember the way Emily van Egmond somehow slipped the ball from beneath two French players and slid it into the path of Mary Fowler, who stood completely alone near the penalty spot, only to see her slow-motion shot cleared off the line by a desperate, diving Élisa de Almeida.
We'll remember the way Katrina Gorry lifted her head and floated the ball onto the toe of Fowler, with only the goalkeeper to beat, but the goalkeeper beating her to it instead.
And we'll remember the way half-time seemed to take forever but also arrive suddenly; these moments of panic and possibility puncturing the thickness of the game around it, the tightness that pulled and pulled, poised to snap as soon as it had stretched too far.
And what about the sound? My god, the sound. The sound like a wave that carried every Matildas attack forward. The sound of the boos that haunted every blue shirt. The sound when Sam Kerr picked up her shin-pads and walked towards the sideline. The sound when she immediately ghosted in behind France's defence and take off down the left and breathed new life into a flattening side.
Fowler twisting away from three enraged French players, Kyra Cooney-Cross twirling and accelerating into the yawning green beyond, the 10-minute spell where it felt like the world was shifting on its axis, but then shifting back the way it came once Vicki Becho was on the field.
Do you remember extra-time stretching into infinity as their legs began to slow and it felt like both sides were one bad pass away from oblivion?
And all this happened before the other game began — the mind-and-moment game — the game where heroes and horrors are immortalised.
Mackenzie Arnold standing on the goal line again and again, re-writing her own fairytale again and again, diving and saving, diving and missing, taking and missing, diving and saving.
The order of the takers is jumbled in our memories now, too many of them one after the other to name. All we have are moments: gasps, sighs, boos, whistles, the pings of posts and the thud of gloves. Clinging to whoever or whatever was near us as Kerr put her 2019 ghosts to bed and Steph Catley's empty legs brought them back.
Blow for blow, one exhausted player after another, stretching this out for as long as they could without snapping. The substitute Becho stretches it to the impossible, the sound of the ball hitting the post as clear as a bell, the sound the whole world had been waiting for.
And then it's Cortnee Vine walking towards the penalty spot. Cortnee Vine placing the ball in the grass. Cortnee Vine taking three steps backwards and pausing. Cortnee Vine snapping the tension, the net bulging, her pale limbs wheeling off into the night.
Tens of thousands erupting in the stands, nobody knowing what to do, losing ourselves in the rapture of the hurricane.
This is how it feels to be taken to the horizon of what football can be and then flying straight off its edge, feeling your stomach drop, your chest thump, your senses alive to every aching moment.
And yet none of those words — not the setting or the characters, the complications or the climax — will get close to telling the true story of this.
Because you just had to be there. You had to live it. You had to be in this moment with millions of others, transfixed by the game that stopped the nation.
And those who watched it will remember where they were, who they were with, what they were doing. They'll remember the trembling, the distant drums, the sound of the future holding its breath.
Years from now, when someone asks you to tell the story of the night the Matildas made World Cup history, what will you say?
The France game. Maybe that will be all you'll need to say. And everyone will know exactly what you mean.