Norway beat England, and I am typing this on two hours of sleep

The alarm went off at 2:15am and I have not really gone back to sleep since, which either makes this the clearest writing I will do all week or the least reliable, and I genuinely cannot tell you which yet. Norway beat England on penalties. Norway are in the World Cup semifinal. I need to say both of those sentences out loud a few more times before they start feeling like facts instead of something I dreamed up somewhere around minute 100.

How it actually went

It was not the Haaland exhibition I half expected after four matches of him bending the tournament to his will. England set up to strangle him specifically, and for most of ninety minutes it mostly worked, two and sometimes three shirts on him every time the ball came within thirty yards. Norway’s goal came from somewhere else entirely, a set piece just after the hour mark that had nothing to do with any script anyone had written for this match. Kane pulled England level with the kind of finish that reminds you exactly why he is one goal behind Haaland for the tournament and not two behind anybody else. Extra time changed nothing that mattered. It went to penalties, the worst and best way for a match like this to end, and Norway’s goalkeeper, a name most of us could not have told you three weeks ago, guessed right twice.

I will be honest about the part that surprised me most. It was not the win. I picked Norway before kickoff, for reasons I already put in writing, so some part of me was prepared for this outcome even if I did not believe it. What surprised me was that Haaland barely factored into the winning of it, and somehow that makes the story better, not worse. This was not one player dragging ten passengers to a result. England spent an entire game plan trying to make sure of exactly that, and Norway won anyway, through a set piece and a goalkeeper and eleven players who apparently do not need their best one to be unplayable every single night.

What a country of five million does with this

Norway have never been to a World Cup semifinal. Not close, not almost, never. The closest reference point anyone here in Nepal has is watching a small footballing nation get one famous result and then vanish, which is its own kind of story, but not this one. This is a team that beat a five-time champion in the round of 16 and a European heavyweight in the quarterfinal, back to back, and has a semifinal left to play.

I do not have a tidy conclusion for what this means beyond the obvious one, which is that I will be setting another alarm later this week, and so will a lot of people I know, for a team that most of us adopted three weeks ago purely because of one player’s name on the back of a shirt we already owned. That adoption held up under pressure, is the thing. It was not just a Haaland bandwagon. By penalty number four last night, half the room I was in cared more about the Norwegian goalkeeper’s hands than about who scored the goals. That is what a real run does. It stops being about the reason you started watching and becomes its own thing entirely.

Get some rest if you also stayed up. I am going to attempt the same, right after I watch the penalties one more time.