Sitting around after Liverpool beat City 3-1. Waiting for the emotional payoff of this fraternal twin of a baseball playoffs elimination game to splash across my face. A booming switch plays in my head here, a head touch there, an open beam into the left side of the net, blood red shirts running around powder blue; it’s new, it’s different, it’s wrong?
Last season’s City, you always knew they were better than me, even if they flailed or overheated or slept in against Crystal Palace. Against Liverpool, City was a cliff, made of hard rock, but also a giant octopus/hydra hybrid: cut off one fearsome De Bruyne tentacle and it grows right back as Leroy Sane. By grace alone Liverpool didn’t lose to them twice. I would watch the highlights of the Reds (I hate this nickname, it reminds me that Lebron is also a fan, which makes me feel cheap, but I need a pronoun) winning back to back against City in the Champions League Quarterfinals in 2018, and it seemed so implausible that it must have taken place in a different universe with different gravity, different physical laws.
And now my guys are – what manner of undefeated are they? 10-0-1? 11-0-1? Does it even matter? And they have deliberately and confidently sent down the overwhelming, immeasurable, utterly sure reason why this unbeaten streak couldn’t last, why it was just lucky. And I don’t want to read the articles, I don’t want the 12 different easy ways I’ll hear talking heads on Youtube say that it’s Liverpool’s title to lose. I just want to see Mo Salah smiling, Jurgen Klopp’s perfect teeth. And those torrents of blood red in the stands at Anfield, rippling and crashing like a sea of the right kind of humanity. The right kind of deep, pain-lit interconnection and raw feeling. The maximum example of the power of stories, and of humans shouting together, put out there for us to be wrapped up in, to help us feel justified as ourselves. Bless us, bless Liverpool.