I wanted to stop time, hold the world off with my bare hands, keep the headlines and the bad press and the shitty takes that were coming away from my guys. I wanted us to win, not just to prove the whole damn world wrong, but because they deserved it. Because they’d built more than a team in these months: they’d built a family, and here we were. I wanted to protect that with everything I was. Take every muscle fiber, every calcium atom, every drop of blood I had, and build a fortress around these men.
