On Boxing Day of 1920, 53,000 people filed into the famous Goodison Park stadium in northern Liverpool to watch a football match.
They squeezed onto every available wooden bench and stood shoulder-to-shoulder around the field, and behind the nets, treading on each other's toes to try to get the best view.
Outside the gates, 10,000 more waited, hoping there was room to spare, desperate to catch a glimpse of the history that was about to unfold within.
However, the stands were already at capacity. The excited crowds were reluctantly turned away.
Not long afterwards, two teams — the famous Dick, Kerr Ladies and St Helens Ladies, who'd formed out of the many women factory workers during World War I — walked out onto the field to a swell of noise and rapturous applause.
It was the closing match of an historic tour that the Dick, Kerr Ladies team from Preston North End had embarked upon throughout 1920.
They played matches throughout England, with tens of thousands of people flocking to watch them in storied grounds — such as Old Trafford and Stamford Bridge — before becoming the first British women's team to travel overseas to play France in Paris, Roubaix, Le Havre and Rouen in front of more than 62,000 total spectators.
They returned to England unbeaten, their reputation preceding them as cheering crowds lined the streets along their victory route to welcome them home.
Then came Goodison. It was the game that changed everything for football in England — but for all the wrong reasons.
The attendance record, which stood for 92 years, was one thing: While the men's game had been expanded, with more clubs and tiers added to the domestic pyramid, they weren't attracting the kinds of crowds that the women's game was getting at the time.
The fundraising was another: The match, which DKL won 4-0, reportedly raised over 3,000 pounds (roughly 140,000 pounds, or $245,000, today), with the proceeds being donated to charities helping the unemployed and disabled ex-servicemen who had returned from the war.
However, rather than seeing this blossoming area of the game as an opportunity for growth, the Football Association and wider political establishment saw it as a threat.
The women's game was something they had no control over: not the fixtures, not the ticket sales, not the destination of the money raised, and certainly not the women who raised it.
And, so, the following year, in December of 1921, the FA banned them. Women were forbidden from playing football on association-run pitches, effectively relegating them to public parks and backyards.
"Complaints having been made as to football being played by women, Council felt impelled to express the strong opinion that the game of football is quite unsuitable for females and should not be encouraged," the FA's infamous ruling read.
The ban quickly fanned out across the world as multiple national associations followed suit.
Some, such as Brazil, banned women outright from the game, while others l— such as Australia — simply refused to provide the resources and opportunities to play, which had the same effect.
Just as it was on the precipice of something special, women's football was flung into the shadows. It would remain there for the next 50 years.
But that didn't stop the Dick, Kerr Ladies team.
They defied the ban and continued to travel and play, crossing the Atlantic for another tour in Canada and the USA in 1922, although they were forced to play against men's teams due to the lack of women's sides abroad.
In 1923, they took part in the first ever match played at night under electric lights at Turf Moor.
In 1926, they changed their name to Preston Ladies.
In 1937, they were challenged by Edinburgh Ladies in the first recorded "Championship of the World" match at Squires Gate in Blackpool, which they won 5-1.
In 1957, a pilot Women's European Championship was organised in Berlin between teams from West Germany, the Netherlands, Austria and eventual champions, England — despite the fact that women's football was officially forbidden by the German federation.
In 1970, Italy hosted the first recorded Women's World Championship — named the Martini & Rossi Cup after independent sponsors — which featured teams from Denmark, Mexico, Germany, Austria, Switzerland and England.
The next year, there was a second global tournament in Mexico, a pilot Women's World Cup that saw tens of thousands of spectators once again cramming into major stadiums to watch women's football.
Despite all the bans, the taboos, the harassment and the punishments, women's football survived, carried on the shoulders of generations of women who ensured it would not slip away into the darkness.
It was their collective effort — their collective defiance — that helped see the ban on women playing football eventually lifted that year, in 1971.
Slowly, achingly, the women's game began to open up across England and across the world.
Domestic clubs were founded and national teams were formed, continental and international tournaments were organised, old chapters came to a close and new ones began to be written.
Its history would begin to be unearthed, too, having been kept safe in the yellowed pages of family photo albums and the treasure-chest memories of the women who had participated in it all those years ago.
All of them have been tied together by these small acts of defiance, this collective refusal to succumb to what others told them was possible.
It was this history that echoed around Wembley Stadium on Monday morning as, a century after that famous Goodison game, 87,000 people watched England's Lionesses defeat Germany to claim the 2022 Women's European Championship title: the first major trophy for the nation since 1966, when women were still banned from the sport.
The roar that erupted from the sold-out stadium at the full-time was not just the noise of the present but also a noise of the past, as though all those forgotten and silenced women over the past 100 years cried out in one rebellious voice: "We told you so."
The game itself was, in a strange way, the most fitting reflection of that history.
England's 2-1 victory was not the slick, easy football we had seen from them across this tournament.
It was gutsy, it was rough, it was exhausting. It was full of grit and fire and heart, and a deep refusal to give up, despite the odds. It was a game that contained within it all the resilience and determination that has kept women's football alive.
Over the next weeks and months and years, thousands of words will pour out about August 1, 2022.
Images, too: Ella Toone's audacious chip, German legend Alex Popp with her head in her hands, bright young star Chloe Kelly tearing off across the pitch whirling her jersey in the air. Words and images that try to capture what this is, what it means, why it matters.
But they will all, in the end, fall a little bit short. Because this is something that cannot be captured, even in the most elegant of sentences nor the most moving of images.
It is at once a single moment and a collection of moments: the dazzling light of a star that has travelled for many years from some distant place to reach us now, here.
This thing is a feeling: a feeling of the past heaving itself into the future, as it threatened to do one hundred years ago, and which those who have been part of it have always known it could.
It's a feeling of a world standing on the precipice of an era it always should have had.
England's title win, then, is not just a moment for the players, the staff and the country. It is a moment for the entire women's game, the latest step in this generations-long protest, the most recent act in this long history of defiance.
And while it all feels brand-new — the record-breaking crowds and viewership figures, the millions in sponsorship and broadcast deals, the front-and-back papers and pages of column inches — this is a moment that has been 100 years in the making.
Because women's football has always been here. It has always been fighting and scrapping and refusing to give in.
Now, after all this time, the doors are swinging open. The nets are up, the lights are on, and the crowd is beginning to swell.
In the end, two teams will walk out onto a field. They will look up into overflowing stands, take a deep breath, and know that their long-awaited day has finally arrived.
