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A quick warning, there are curse words that are unbeeped in today's episode of the show. If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, www.thisamericanlife.org. From WBEZChicago, it's This American Life, I'm a manual jochi, sitting in for Ira Glass. So about two months ago, I left work in the middle of the day and joined about 100 million people worldwide in a very particular kind of prayer. Now I wish I could tell you that I was praying for a fix to any of the world's problems, but I wasn't. Instead, I was standing in a crowded bar in downtown Brooklyn, screaming my lungs off for my favorite British soccer team, Arsenal Football Club. Arsenal are my hometown London team. A lot of the fans in the bar are just like me, there's quite a few Brits, lots of black 30-somethings, probably because when I was a kid, I just wear Arsenal catfish an entire generation of us into supporting them. They played some of the best soccer I had ever seen with a team full of all these black legends. They went an entire season without losing a game in the British Premier League. And then they stopped winning and decided to break my heart every year for the next 20 years. My brothers and sisters in Christ, I have seen some things. I've seen us lose by record margins, I've seen two separate seasons derailed by horrific. Why did you show that in slow motion leg breaks? I saw one of my favourite players leave us for our rivals, beat us to win a trophy, and then thank us sarcastically afterwards. Arsenal have sometimes upset me so much that for the sake of the people I love, I've had deliberately skipped games for day or family events, just because I don't want to look stricken in our photos. But then three years ago, lots of things just kind of started to go our way. We finished that season as the second best team in England, and since then it just feels like we've been inching ever closer to the coming winners again. We've got this young coach, my mum says it's far too pretty to be so smart, we have a star player who, I don't know, I love like he's my own son, and this most recent season we went on this miraculous run in European soccer's biggest competition, the Champions League. I'm talking defensive master classes, big upsets, players scoring the kind of goals they've never scored before in their entire lives. It felt like the conditions at that moment for Arsenal were perfect. We had the right players, the right coach, and some of our opponents, they were having an uncharacteristically bad year, which brings us to the day I left work to go to the bar. We were now at the end of the season, it may be the biggest Arsenal game in 20 years. Arsenal were playing a French team, Paris Saint-Germain in the semi-finals, a team we knew we could be, in fact we'd beaten them earlier in the season. What we had to do was do it again, and walking around the bar that day before the game, I had two different feelings from people. The first was joy and optimism, like wow, we could actually win this. Then there was the second sort of nagging feeling, which was people experiencing how great this moment was, and feeling dread because of it. They more about that. This is a good opportunity, but I feel like we're at the tail end of our good opportunities. It's been good opportunities now for like three years, and I think we're on the other side of the curve. It's ending, it's been too good for too long.
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