To reach history, England first had to suffer. To shed the pain of the past, the Lionesses had to stare into the brink, and Wembley had to feel as if history was repeating itself again as penalties loomed. It was happening again, it had to be, that in a final of a major tournament and after weeks of making an overwhelmingly positive impact, that England would too be hit with the cold, crushing realisation that it simply wasn’t meant to be.
But this is a different team, unburdened by past scars, whose journey to Wembley under Sarina Wiegman had instead been fuelled by the opportunity to forge its future, to change the sport and, with it, wider society too. You could feel that emotion in Chloe Kelly’s winner, scrambled over the line but followed by the rawest of celebrations. That joy will carry into the night, and in the years to come might be remembered as the moment where everything changed.
