Lucia Herrero had not slept more than four hours a night since the whistle at the Etihad, and she had never been happier at work.
She was twenty-nine, a junior producer on the morning sports show at a Madrid radio station, and for the past week the newsroom had been a storm of ringing phones and cold coffee.
On the wall above her desk, three silent televisions looped the same sixty seconds of footage, and she had long since stopped being able to look at it directly.
A young man with a quiet face stands at the edge of the box, a ball rolls toward him, and for one breath nothing moves. Then the net ripples, and a whole stadium forgets how to make a sound.
"Sixty-two million views," said Teresa, the social media intern, swiveling her chair around with her phone in one hand. She was twenty-two and had stopped saying hello some days ago. "And the press conference clip has fifty-eight. With Spanish subtitles."
"That is not possible," Lucia said.
