Everything’s the Best: Expecting the Unexpected

Some musings ahead of Liverpool’s return to the Champions League Final. There is a unique magic that can be extracted from the ordinary bones of a soccer match. I remember one such moment in high school. Our team was the worst in the league: we were the newest team in the league, only having fielded a team for two seasons to that point, for one, and we were a math and science magnet school made up of students from underserved areas of Los Angeles playing in a league comprised of rich prep schools, to boot. The best record any of the two other iterations of our teams had managed was a single point in the first year of its existence.

The unexpected, though, is what often makes a legend and given that we were up against a prep school whose student parking lot elicited full-on gasps from...