Juan carefully folded his white and green scarf and laid it beside his wife, Loli. It had been years since his last game, yet his ritual remained the same whenever he returned from the pitch: two scarves, side by side.
She settled into a small, cramped chair, the crochet coasters she had knit spread beneath her, and she turned on the radio. The air carried a soft buzz of static and voices, a familiar soundtrack to their evenings together.
At 76, he had weathered many seasons of the game, both the triumphs and the disappointments. This year, though, brought extra strain, compounded by the events of today.
From his spot at the north end of the stadium, he could not clearly tell whether there was a hand in the box, whether it should be a penalty, or whether the scoreline would stay stubbornly imbalanced. Yet the conversations from nearby subscribers left little doubt: the call had been a penalty, and the game was slipping away.
Loli would not miss a beat. His eyesight was keen, and more than that, he always knew the rules. For years, Juan’s relatives had lobbied to bring him to that old field bordered by palm trees in their neighborhood. That place had given him a lifetime of memories—the day he met her, the moment when the team’s star slid past several opponents and controlled the ball with a swift, deft touch near the goal line. The pitch seemed to tremble, and when the ball found the net, he hugged his father. Loli’s eyes scanned the crowd, searching for someone to share the joy with, and that shared light lingered in her gaze as she looked for him.
As the memories rolled through him, the stadium’s local station kept repeating concerns about fairness in the deportation case, and he found himself aligning with Juan, accepting the sentiment shared by everyone in the stands. There was no clear explanation for why that inadvertent hand, distant from the goal, led to a red card, a decision that felt off to many spectators.
Another match came and went in a haze of downtime, punctuated by a couple of controversial hands that went unwhistled. There were protests, muttered under breaths: “How unfair,” “Always the same,” “Always to us.”
Juan’s mood sank, his tension rising with the game’s final moments. Rather than catching a ride home, he chose to walk, partly because of a stubborn bug he blamed for the delay, partly to let the weight of the moment settle in his lungs, to quiet the clamor in his head. The walk offered a kind of quiet ritual, a moment to reset amid the noise of the day.
About an hour and a little later, he found himself back in the apartment that looked out onto the field that had witnessed so many seasons of his life. He thought of his father, of Loli, and of all the chances and losses that had threaded through those years. He swallowed the lump in his throat and kept on, step by step, letting the memory pace him home.
Later, he lifted the newspaper from the nightstand and scanned the sports pages. Elche CF would be away the following week, the ink promising a different angle on the next chapter of their story.
“I’ll head to Manolo’s bar tomorrow,” he told himself, “to reserve the usual table for us. I won’t miss that game.”
In that quiet promise lay a simple truth: the routine, the ritual, and the shared joy of football kept their evenings steady, even when the scorelines did not.