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There she was: tearing off towards the frenzied crowd of Stadium Australia, a single fist in the air, the back of England's net still rippling as goalkeeper Mary Earps looked up into the sky and cursed.
Sam Kerr had just scored one of the best and most important goals of her career: a long-range strike to bring the Matildas level with the European Champions in the Women's World Cup semifinal.
And yet, when the ball sliced through the collective breath of millions and pierced the top corner, Kerr's goal felt like something even more significant than all of that.
Because of everything that had happened in the lead-up — the calf injury that struck her down the day before the opening game, the minute-by-minute monitoring for aches and pains, the hot light of the world's media watching her every move, her forlorn figure curled up on the bench as she watched the tournament that should have been hers pass her by — Kerr's goal against England felt like an act of defiance.
Maybe that's why, as she reached the white paint of the sideline, she celebrated the way that she did. Letting the noise of the nation wrap around her, Kerr put two fists to her chest and ripped it open, Superman-style, roaring right back at them.
Here was Kerr's career captured in a single gesture: something ferociously superhuman, something close to impossible, something that may never be seen or touched again.
And to think we might not have seen it at all.
From 2011 to 2015, Kerr suffered three serious injuries that could have ended her career before it had really begun. Her first ACL in 2011 took her out of the London Olympics. A second knee injury in 2014 almost kept her out of the 2015 Women's World Cup. And a fracture to her foot later that year saw her teetering on the edge of selection for the 2016 Olympics in Rio.
Another major injury, she told a friend at that time, and she was going to quit football for good.
But then something changed. It was as though her body took the threat of early retirement seriously: for the past seven years, Kerr has been remarkably injury-free, and as a result, has gone on to have one of the most prolific goal-scoring careers in women's football history.
Her list of individual honours and records spills across multiple countries, continents, and competitions. She's the only player to win the Golden Boot in three different leagues, a multi-year finalist of the FIFA Best and Ballon d'Or awards, and multiple MVPs and Best XIs and Player of the Years.
She holds the record for the most goals scored for Australia (69), the most goals scored by an Australian at the Olympics (7), the only Australian to score a World Cup hat-trick (2019), and is still the all-time leading scorer for teams she hasn't played for in years (Perth Glory, Sky Blue FC, Chicago Red Stars).
Since joining Chelsea FC in 2020, she's scored 99 goals in 128 games, winning two Golden Boots along the way and setting records in multiple other competitions. In 2021, less than three days after stepping off an international flight, Kerr scored a brace to help Chelsea win the Women's FA Cup final against Arsenal.
These are the extraordinary feats that Sam Kerr is rightly celebrated for; the numbers that, no matter how often they're repeated, continue to boggle the mind.
But these numbers were always going to come with a cost. Now, as she turns into her 30s, the very human body of Sam Kerr is starting to suffer the wear and tear of the superhuman feats she has forced it to perform.
Even before Monday morning's news that Kerr had injured her ACL broke, the signs of an inevitable crash had been there over the past 12 months.
She had been kept strategically absent from a handful of international windows as the Matildas' medical staff tried to manage her playing load and long-distance travel.
She had struggled with ongoing niggles at Chelsea that she had never been able to get quite right, but a packed playing calendar forced her to push through them anyway.
And then, of course, the calf injury that marred the start of her World Cup, as well as the other calf injury — which she sustained to her good leg in the third-place play-off against Sweden — marring the end of it.
It was only a matter of time before a season-ending injury came along; only so far she could bend before breaking. How cold and cruel of an irony is it that the very same body that has taken you to these heights can, with a single bad twist of the knee, rip you right back down again. To turn you from superhuman to simply and tragically human once more.
Loading...So where to from here? What does this mean for Kerr, for Chelsea, for the Matildas, and for women's football itself?
She is the latest high-profile player to suffer a type of knee injury that is becoming increasingly common at the highest levels of the sport. The reasons why are complex and multifaceted, combining both physiological and environmental factors, with more and more players calling for urgent funding and research into the ACL epidemic which kept a host of footballers out of last year's World Cup altogether.
With women players increasingly seen as financial commodities to clubs, brands, and competitions, Kerr's injury now adds one of the loudest and most powerful voices in world sport to that conversation: a small light, perhaps, within the deeper darkness that extends ahead of her for the next 8-12 months.
As for Chelsea, they now must turn to their bench to try and find a fitting replacement for a player who has, for the past three seasons, been irreplaceable to them, and embark upon multiple and simultaneous title runs without their biggest goal-scoring weapon.
This injury isn't just the end of Kerr's Chelsea season; it is also the end of an era, with long-time head coach Emma Hayes departing for the US Women's National Team in late May. The coach who lured Kerr to England, setting her up for three years of meteoric success, will probably not coach her again.
The Matildas must grapple with the same issue. With the Paris Olympic Games just seven months away, Kerr is almost certain to miss it. Luckily, though, the team now knows how it feels to navigate a major tournament without her: the World Cup was, in some ways, proof of that.
In fact, Kerr's absence allowed other players like Caitlin Foord, Hayley Raso, Mary Fowler and Emily van Egmond to shine, showing that the team does not revolve around this one miraculous player as many of us once feared it did.
Emerging and peripheral players like Amy Sayer, Remy Siemsen, Larissa Crummer and Cortnee Vine now have clearer air to stake their claim as Australia's next-in-line number nine. And, like Hayes, head coach Tony Gustavsson may not get the opportunity to coach Kerr again, with his contract reportedly ending once the Olympics are over and reports linking him to offers elsewhere.
But none of this is as important as what this means for Kerr herself. A player whose career, whose identity, and whose daily purpose has been deeply tied to this thing that her body no longer allows her to do.
There is a cold cruelty that it happened now, while at the peak of her powers, having spent so much of the past seven years injury-free as she and her team-mates built the profile and visibility of women's football, carrying the weight of the nation on their shoulders during a home World Cup, and entering into a golden era for the sport in Australia after it was done.
But after the gruelling crisscrossing of the globe for national and international tournaments, the growing number of games added to an already-bloated calendar, the slim snatches of time she has to see friends and family, the shrinking days of rest and recovery, and the toll that has all taken on not just her body but her mind, perhaps being brought back into the realm of the human is exactly what she needs.