Open Play: Ladies, Goals, The Everything System in-between

Chapter 79: [79] "The final Piii Piii Piiii of 2023"

Minute eighty-seven.

Hugo jogged to the touchline.

He pointed at his left ankle. Not dramatically.

Juliette was on her feet before he reached the white line. She walked out to meet him.

Henri was beside her, a hand on Hugo’s shoulder, checking with his face what Juliette was checking with her hands.

Hugo sat down on the touchline, removed his boot without being asked, and let Juliette work.

Edouard, the 28 year old versatile right back, came on for the final three minutes.

The entire crowd stood for Hugo as he walked along the touchline toward the bench. Thirty thousand people who understood what the seventeen-year-old had been doing every match day since August.

Hugo pulled his training jacket over his shoulders without looking across at the stands.

He sat down and immediately started watching the pitch. Same as Bastien did.

---

Minute ninety.

The fourth official raised the board.

Three additional minutes.

AC Nord’s manager, Revert, had both hands in his coat pockets. He watched the board go up and then looked back at the pitch without any visible change of expression. His team was four goals down in the final match before Christmas, bottom of the table, heading toward relegation with mathematical certainty.

He had stood on this touchline and managed a squad of professionals with complete dignity for four months anyway.

He deserved that acknowledgment even if nobody gave it to him.

Ninety plus one.

Lacombe drove the ball to the byline and pulled it back.

Idriss arrived at the penalty spot and drilled it.

The keeper got it with both palms, collapsed backward over his line from the power of the shot, and held the ball above his head while lying on his back in the goalmouth.

The fourth official and his assistants registered it was a save after review.

The crowd applauded the keeper.

The keeper sat up slowly.

He had played the match of his life. He had gone the right way... almost every time. He had made sixteen saves, hit by a hat-trick that required the intervention of something beyond ordinary physics to overcome him.

He pulled off his right glove and held it in his left hand, looking at it.

Ninety plus two.

Hugo from the bench shouted something at Cillian about pressing in the Nord half that nobody was going to execute in the final ninety seconds of a 4-0 home win.

Mateo walked the ball into the corner arc and shielded it from their striker.

The striker didn’t press. He stood beside Mateo and accepted the end of the match in a professional way.

Ninety plus three.

Piii.

Piii.

Piii.

Stade Valois made a sound that the venue would remember for whatever remained of its structural life.

The pitch was immediately invaded by noise, not people, the physical containment held, but the noise came down from the stands in waves that made the referee instinctively cover one ear.

SC Valois 4 – AC Nord 0.

Final match of 2023.

Mateo took off the captain’s armband.

He looked at it.

He pulled Luc close by the back of the neck and pressed the armband into Luc’s chest with his other hand. He didn’t put it on Luc’s arm. That was Henri’s decision and the board’s decision and the formality of paperwork.

But the gesture was clear.

This is yours now.

Luc took it.

He held it in his right hand, the worn elastic of the fabric, the faded gold on the black. The actual weight of it was almost nothing. The weight of what it meant was something else entirely.

"You earned it," Mateo said. "Everything. The hard way."

---

Hugo came back onto the pitch in his training jacket, his boot back on. The ankle had not been serious. A precaution. Juliette had diagnosed it in four minutes and cleared him to walk normally.

He found Luc near the center circle.

"The keeper," Hugo said, watching the Nord goalkeeper being consoled by his own players near their goal. "He was brilliant."

"He was," Luc agreed.

"You still scored three."

"Eventually."

Hugo smiled. "You’re third goal was crazy."

"It was, wasn’t it."

"Magnifique," Hugo said with a tone, he expected nothing less from the person beside him.

He turned and they both walked back toward the tunnel.

[System Notification]

[Wager Tally (Final): Open Play Goals — Beaumont 16 | Fontaine 16]

[DRAW. The wager ends as a draw.]

[Fontaine’s penalty total: 9 goals across the first half. Excluded from the Open Play count per original terms. He wins nothing. You lose nothing. The rivalry continues.]

[TES balance: 2 General Points | 1 Skill Point | Predatory Aura x1]

[End of the wager. Beginning of everything else.]

[Season continues in January.]

Luc read it on the walk toward the tunnel.

---

Henri was waiting at the entrance.

The shirt under hhis suit was completely untucked now. His tie had been loosened somewhere around the sixty-minute mark. His eyes showed that he had survived something he had not expected to survive and was still obviously processing it.

He extended his hand.

Luc shook it.

"Three goals," Henri said.

"The first one took quite a while."

Henri laughed. The kind that undid the tiredness in his face for a few seconds.

"January," Henri said, his expression returning to a professional one. "The second half of the season. We need to talk about the squad, about Mateo’s replacement, about your role going forward."

"I know."

"There are things I need to tell you."

Luc remembered what Valérie had said about the Qatari approach to Henri. The technical director position. The decision to be made at the end of the season.

"Whenever you’re ready," Luc said.

Henri nodded once and walked toward the dressing room.

---

The dressing room loud.

Four months grinding through a league finally having a specific, quantifiable thing to celebrate.

Not a title or a trophy. Not even their league position. A number.

Sixteen all.

The wager, which had sat over the entire first half of the season like a loaded gun pointed at Luc’s career, had resolved into a draw.

Idriss was sitting with his shirt off, a towel around his neck, talking to Demirci in a rapid mix of French and something else. He caught Luc’s eye across the room.

He raised his chin at him.

Luc raised his chin back.

Bastien was in the far corner still in his kit.

Cillian was singing something in Irish that had no business being sung inside a French football dressing room, but nobody stopped him.

Mateo was already half-dressed, his suit jacket on over his training shorts, moving between players with a hand on each shoulder, saying goodbye the way a captain said goodbye when a few days remained before the departure but the emotional leave-taking had already begun.

Luc sat at his locker.

He pulled the captain’s armband from his jacket pocket.

He placed it on the shelf inside his locker. Although not as his possession.

He had drawn the wager. He had done it in the most physically demanding way available. He had scored sixteen open play goals in the first half of a league season for a club that had been projected to finish in the bottom half.

Surely the whole country knew his name now.

His phone lit up on the bench.

He picked it up.

Three messages.

Valérie:

I think I’m opening a very expensive bottle tonight. It’s the kind that doesn’t get opened for anything less than a war being over and done with — V

Rose:

I SCREAMED. I literally screamed in my apartment. Zara is here and she told me to be quiet and then she screamed too. She’ll deny it. I have a witness (myself).

Zara:

I did not scream.

Congratulations.