“I stretched it twice.”
“Stretch it three times. You’re twenty-seven. Your body doesn’t forgive the way it used to.”
“My body forgives plenty.”
“Your body is lying to you. Bodies do that after twenty-five. Ask Kovár.”
Kovár, mid-banana: “Don’t bring me into this. My body and I have an arrangement.”
“Your arrangement involves too much fruit,” Šíma says. “I’m genuinely concerned.”
The whistle for warmup sounds through the corridor. I stand. The boots feel right. The pitch is waiting outside this tunnel, seventy thousand people and the July heat that Georgia hasn’t surrendered even at eight in the evening. Knockout round. Czechia versus Mexico for a place in the quarterfinal.
I follow the team into the corridor, and the roar builds the way it builds, a low vibration in the concrete that becomes sound when the tunnel opens to the pitch. The air hits first. Stadium-thick. The HVAC lost the fight with July hours ago and the heat has settled into the steel roof and the seats and the grass and everything underneath. My hair is already sticking to my neck.
The pitch opens in front of us and I see the green and the white lines and the goal nets and the stadium seats climbing toward the roof, and I think: this is the city I’m moving to. This stadium. This pitch. This grass that’s softer and thicker than Germangrass. The next time I play here I’ll be wearing red and black instead of red, white, and blue.
Warmup. Dynamic stretches, the circle expanding and contracting. I move through the sequence without thinking. Tomáš sends crosses in from the right, and I meet each one at the top of the jump, and the contact at the forehead is clean, and for twenty minutes my chest has nothing in it except air and effort and the sound of a ball landing where I aimed it.
I scan section 126 once during the stretch. Brief. Three seconds.
Tobík is there. The Czech scarf around his neck. Black t-shirt. He’s sitting between Marchetti and Thompson. He came. He came to a Czech knockout match in his country’s colors eight days after I broke things off via text. The scarf is information. I don’t know what it means. I register it and turn back to the pitch.
The first fifteen minutes are possession chess. Mexico holds the ball in their half, probing, looking for the gap. In the twenty-third minute I win an aerial duel. The jump is timed right and my forehead meets the ball and redirects it to Tomáš. I land and the pitch makes sense the way the pitch always makes sense.
I love this. The ball in the air and my body underneath it and the timing that comes from years of the same drill, the same jump, the same contact point, and none of it is the program right now. This is the thing I chose before anyone told me I had to choose it.
In the thirty-eighth minute Mexico finds a gap on the counter. Their striker beats our left-back and puts a cross in low. I slide. My foot meets the ball a half-second before their forward’s does, and the ball ricochets wide. I get up. My knee has grass stain on it and the left-back is looking at me with the face of a kid who just got beaten.
I put my hand on the back of his neck. “You’re fine. That’s gone. Next one.”
He nods. We reset.
In the fifty-sixth minute, corner kick. Ours. Tomáš takes it. He sends the ball in high, curling toward the near post, and I’m already moving before it leaves his boot because I’ve been reading Tomáš‘s corners for a decade and the body knows before the mind catches up.
I time the jump. The defender beside me jumps late. The ball meets my forehead at the highest point and I send it down and across and the net moves and the sound that comes out of seventy thousand people is the sound that separates football from every other thing in my life.
I land. Šíma reaches me first, arms around my waist, screaming words I can’t hear over the noise. Tomáš is three steps behind him.
I turn toward section 126. Three seconds. I lift a finger to my temple. A small gesture. The kind nobody in the stadium reads because the stadium is too loud and the gesture is not for the stadium.
The last thirty-four minutes are the best football I’ve played in years. Mexico pushes. They send everything forward. I win headers, clear crosses, read the striker’s hips before the striker knows which direction his own body is going. Tomáš and I communicate in the half-sentences of a decade of playing together. Single words and hand signals, and the partnership holds. In the seventy-ninth minute I step in front of a shot heading for the top corner and take it on the chest and the impact runs through my ribs and I don’t care because the ball is ours again and the pitch is the one place where everything I do makes sense.
The whistle goes. Czechia 1, Mexico 0. We are going to the quarterfinals.
Tomáš finds me first. The embrace is brief, his forehead against my shoulder, his hand on the back of my neck. The old gesture, returned.
He pulls back and looks at me and his face is doing the new quiet thing, the thing I haven’t been able to read for two days, and I think: he knows more than I thought he knew. The thought arrives without panic.
We walk toward the tunnel. The handshakes with the Mexican players, the cameras, the press. I glance at section 126. Tobík’s seat is empty. He’s moved. He’s somewhere in the tunnel area I hope, coming down the way he came down after that first match
The team walks into the tunnel and the air is the same air from two weeks ago. Stadium-thick. Georgia heat trapped under the steel roof, July refusing to let anything go. My hair is damp. The flush is still on my skin. Two weeks ago in this same tunnel I watched Tobík arrive in a Czech scarf and I told myself I was fine about it.
The locker room. I get to my locker. The phone in my bag is vibrating.
Atlanta United’s official account. A signing announcement. My name. A photo of me in the Czech kit from the federation database. The caption confirming the transfer.
Below the United notification is a text from Peter. “It’s live. Sorry, I tried to push it to tomorrow.”