For all the long, lonely nights spent putting in the work when you’d rather have been down the pub with your friends. For those barren early mornings before the city’s stirred from slumber, with only the dawn chorus of chirrups and cheeps to cheer you on through the last stretch. For the set-backs and stumbles; the off-days and agony; the times when you were mere moments from sacking it all off and packing it all in.
But now – it’s almost over, before you’ve even quite realised it was all happening. It’s odd, isn’t it, how you spend all those months preparing for something that passes by in what seems like the casual snuff of a candle. The moment hangs in slow-mo, an airless mise-en-scène in total silence, coiled like a spring. A sea of gawping jaws and winking lenses wait in freeze-frame expectation until–
The world turns on again. A roar; a gatling gun of jubilation. You can feel yourself turning to a fuzz under a thousand eyes of adulation and umbrage. Faces blur, music whirrs. Now it’s really all over. Everything was worth it. You are a winner.
You are Victorious.
