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Later that night, Leo finds himself scrolling Neymar’s MySpace endlessly. The posts never seem to end, and before long Leo’s opened YouTube and is scrolling there, too, looking for Neymar’s highlights. He eventually clicks on a video called “NEYMAR skills & tricks 2011 new HD” and settles down to watch it.

This is one of Leo’s favorite pastimes, unfortunately, because it lets him pretend there’s something rational about what he’s doing. He tells himself it’s analysis, study, preparation in the same way he studies any player. Foot placement, timing, the way Neymar shifts his weight just slightly before committing to a direction, etc. It is all the same. However, there’s a difference he doesn’t fully admit, which is that he never watches anyone else like this. On the screen, Neymar cuts inside with that strange, effortless violence that doesn’t look like speed so much as refusal to be caught, and Leo finds himself tracking it, noticing how defenders hesitate for a fraction too long because they expect hesitation that never comes. He thinks, almost clinically at first, about how Neymar creates uncertainty rather than space, how he makes the pitch feel narrower just by existing in it, and yet the longer he watches, the more the analysis starts to blur into something less clean, less defensible.

Because there is a moment, somewhere between a feint and a stumble that isn’t a stumble at all, where Leo forgets to be objective. He watches Neymar glide past a man twice his size so easily it surely is nothing more than a change of mind, and something in Leo’s chest tightens with the uncomfortable familiarity of recognition rather than admiration. It feels less that he is watching a player and more that he is remembering something he was never supposed to see directly. That’s what it becomes in his mind without him meaning it to: a kind of sacred distance, where Neymar only exists safely in fragments, clips, replays, slowed-down angles, frozen frames, because in real time, in person, the scale of him becomes something harder to survive.

Leo lets the video play out in front of him. He notices how the camera almost always lags behind Neymar’s intent, how it only ever captures the aftermath of something that was decided a moment earlier in Neymar’s body, and he thinks, distantly, that this is probably the closest thing to witnessing divinity that someone like him is allowed. Not because Neymar is untouchable, not really, but because in person there is no buffer between intention and impact, no pause where Leo can hide inside understanding instead of reaction. So he becomes what he is now: a careful observer worshipping through repetition, relearning the shape of something he once stood too close to without realizing that proximity alone was never the same as safety...