After the Brazil loss I was told by Toots that my biggest mistake was to actually fall so much in love with a team that infallibility seemed to be an impossibility. It's okay to be loyal, but you've got to at least leave room for the possibility that they might fail. Otherwise you'll be destroyed, as I can personally affirm when Brazil lost (after playing so poorly).

So when Italy played today I was totally cool. I was hoping they'd win, but resigned myself to the fact that they might not and so watched the game with a certain aloofness. I did not want to be devastated again. Once was enough. SO WHEN THEY ACTUALLY SCORED IN THE LAST FEW MINUTES, ADRENALIN STARTED FLOWING ALL OVER AND I WAS SO OVERJOYED THAT I THREW MY CUP OF WATER INTO THE AIR AND STARTED SCREAMING LIKE A BANSHEE! Noises I had never made before were made. AND WHEN THEY SCORED AGAIN I DIDN'T NOW WHETHER MY HEART WOULD ACTUALLY BE ABLE TO TAKE THE SHEER JOY and I just couldn't stop screaming and actually jumping up and down for joy!

Nick Hornby in Fever Pitch (he's the only writer who's actually had the ability to make me laugh out loud) wrote about how he felt when his team unexpectedly won the Cup Final in 1979. This is exactly how I feel right now.

"I was high up on the terraces with other Arsenal fans; I sat down, too dizzy with pain and anger and frustration to be on my feet any longer. I KNEW that it was only a game, that worse things happened at sea, that people were starving in Africa, that there might be a nuclear holocaust withing the next few months; I knew that the score was still 2-2, for heaven's sake, and that there was a chance that Arsenal could somehow find a way out of the mire. But none of this knowledge could help me. I had been but five minutes away from fulfilling the only fully formed ambition I had ever consciously held since the age of eleven; and if people are allowed to grieve when they are passed over for promotion, or when they fail to win an Oscar, or when their novel is rejected by every publisher in London-and our culture allows them to do, even though these people may only have dreamed these dreams fora couple of years, rather than the decade, the HALF-LIFETIME, that I had been dreaming mine-then I was bloody well entitled to sit down on a lump of concrete for two minutes and try to blink back tears.

And it really was for only two minutes. When the game restarted, Liam Brady took the ball deep into the United half. I was watching this, but not SEEING it. When Alan Sunderland got his foot to the ball, poked it in, right into the goal in front of us, and I was shouting not "Yes" or Goal" or any of the other noises that customarily come to my throat at these times but just a noise, "AAAAAAARRRRRRRGGGGGHHHHHHHH", a noise born of utter joy and stunned disbelief...."

That's the noise that came out of my mouth. So this is what utter joy feels like!