I remember when thirteen games felt like a season around here. That first half-year with Tomás was spent counting every result, every tactical tweak and every little sign that this might actually work. We celebrated Pittsburgh because it was his first win. Hartford felt significant because, for perhaps the first time, his football appeared exactly as he’d described it to me. Now I sit down to write these things and Miami have won thirteen of fifteen, haven’t lost a league game all year and are nine points clear of Louisville. Somewhere along the way, the extraordinary has become frighteningly routine.

The numbers are becoming silly. Forty-five goals scored, eight conceded. Most goals in the conference, most possession at 62%, fewest shots faced and the fewest goals allowed. They’ve won 4-1, 4-0 twice, 5-0 twice and put five past Sporting JAX away. Even the awkward afternoons haven’t really hurt them: draws at Pittsburgh and Detroit are the only league matches they haven’t won. Orlando did knock them out of the Open Cup, so the season isn’t completely without blemish, but perhaps that has helped. Last year the Cup became this enormous adventure that carried us all the way to the final. This time there is only the league, and Miami currently look like a team intent on strangling the life out of it.

What I like most, though, is that the faces responsible for it don’t necessarily look like the ones I expected when we started this whole thing. Kaleb Spielman was given ten goals as his little challenge for the year, the carrot Tomás dangled in front of him for a starting place next season. He’d got fourteen before Europe and a record transfer for this level came calling. Adrian Escobar is seventeen years old and has six goals from seven appearances. Jaydion Locadia is eighteen and has seven goals and five assists. David Sibrián is 21 and continues to play serious minutes in the middle of a championship-chasing side. These aren’t ceremonial academy appearances at the end of games already won. The kids are becoming part of why they’re being won.

And then there’s Francisco Javier Castillo. I’m running out of sensible things to write about Francisco. He was the academy kid when Tomás arrived, then the promising wing-back, then Player of the Year, and now he’s twenty years old with four goals, nine assists and an average rating north of eight. He leads the league for assists, dribbles and Player of the Match awards. I watched him make his first-team breakthrough wondering whether he could survive at this level. Now I’m wondering how much longer Miami can realistically keep him from clubs operating several levels above it.

Maybe that’s part of why this particular stretch feels important to me. I’ve spent years writing about Tomás building things: first an idea, then a team, then something approaching a culture. Miami doesn’t feel like a project anymore. Castillo creates. Słonina keeps them out at the other end. Cappis, Tomkinson and Gielen provide the boring reliability that championship teams always seem to have beneath the fireworks. Different players come in and the machine keeps moving.

And perhaps that’s why I’ve found myself thinking about endings lately.

Not because anything feels finished. Quite the opposite. Miami could be on the verge of its greatest season, and there are nine league games still sitting there waiting to ruin every sentence I’ve just written. But I’ve followed Tomás long enough to recognise when he starts looking beyond the thing immediately in front of him. There was a time when I assumed that wherever his football went, my notebook would follow.

I’m not quite as certain of that anymore.

Maybe that’s okay.

I’ve known about this for a little while. Not long enough for it to feel normal, but long enough that I’ve had several attempts at writing something clever about it and deleted every one.

Tomás Villalba is leaving Miami FC.

There. That’s probably all it needs.

The strange part about working in communications is that sometimes you have to turn something enormous into six paragraphs of absolutely nothing. Contract expires. Discussions regarding his future. Full focus on the remaining fixtures. No further comment. I know why we do it. There are four games left and Miami are four games away from retaining the USL Championship. The last thing anybody needs is a month-long public autopsy of why the manager is leaving, where he might be going or what happens afterwards. There will be time for all of that. Tonight, my job was simply to make the announcement, check the spelling, stare at the screen for considerably longer than necessary and press publish.

I suppose I’ve always known this moment would come. Tomás was never going to stay still forever. Knoxville became Greenville. Greenville became Miami. Every time the surroundings got bigger, his football seemed to grow into them rather than become intimidated by them. Miami gave him resources, expectations and pressure that he hadn’t really experienced before, and he responded by building one of the best teams at this level. Last season they won the conference. This season, with four games remaining, they’re trying to do it again. Whatever happens next doesn’t change any of that.

But this one feels different for me.

When he left Knoxville, I followed the story. When Greenville ended, somehow our paths properly joined. Miami eventually employed both of us, which still feels faintly ridiculous when I remember the reporter who first started driving around the South because somebody had decided soccer was the assignment he deserved. For years, Tomás moving somewhere else has automatically meant another road appearing in front of me. Another town. Another stadium. Another chapter.

This time, I’m not sure it does.

Maybe that is what I’ve been trying not to write. Tomás has his career and I have mine. Somewhere along the way those two things became tangled together, but perhaps they were never supposed to remain that way forever. I’ve watched him become a proper football manager while I’ve somehow become a football person myself. I don’t need to stand ten yards away from him with a notebook for either of those things to remain true.

There are four games left, anyway. Four games before any of this becomes real. Four games for Tomás to finish what he started and leave Miami with another championship.

So I’ll do what the statement says. No further comment. For now.

The strange thing about endings is how much admin they involve.

Miami FC are champions again and, within about three minutes of the final whistle, my phone was full of questions about Sporting JAX. When are we lifting the trophy? Which players are available for media? Are we doing something for Tomás before kick-off or afterwards? Does the club want a separate graphic for the title and the farewell? Somebody wanted photographs from last year’s celebrations. Somebody else needed me to approve some copy. I had a half-finished beer beside my laptop that I’d completely forgotten about.

Perhaps that’s useful. There isn’t much time to become sentimental when you’re responsible for telling everybody else how sentimental they should be.

The title itself feels different this time. Last year was chaos and disbelief, this wonderful sense that something had happened slightly quicker than any of us expected. This one has been coming for months. Miami have been the best team in the division and, eventually, the table has simply confirmed it. Tomás will leave having done exactly what he said he wanted to do: build something capable of winning again rather than merely remembering what it had won before.

I saw him briefly afterwards. There wasn’t some great cinematic exchange. No embrace beneath the floodlights, no profound final sentence for me to scribble down. We spoke about the game. He mentioned something that had annoyed him in the second half. I told him he had just won the league and was therefore allowed to be happy for at least one evening. He gave me the sort of look that suggested this was an unreasonable request.

That, actually, felt much more like us.

Sporting JAX now becomes an unusual football match. Nothing is riding on it and absolutely everything seems attached to it. The trophy will be there. Families will be there. People who haven’t been around the club for months will suddenly appear again. There’ll be photographs and speeches and probably a few people crying who will later insist they weren’t. My job will be to package all of that into something neat enough to fit on a phone screen.

And somewhere in the middle of it, there will simply be a football match.

I think that’s what I want to concentrate on.

Not Knoxville. Not Greenville. Not where Tomás goes next. I’ve written enough about roads recently.

Just ninety minutes.

One final team sheet with Tomás Villalba — Head Coach underneath it. One final half-time post. One final result. One final walk across the pitch while I’m standing somewhere nearby pretending to be busy with my phone.

Then I can work out how to write the ending.

I’m just not going to write it before it happens.

Miami is a much bigger place when nobody is paying you to get somewhere quickly, something I discovered on a Thursday evening while crawling west towards Doral with the air conditioning working considerably harder than the traffic. For most of the previous two years I’d travelled across the city with some kind of purpose attached to the journey. Training at ten, media at twelve, matchday three hours before kickoff, airport at an hour when sensible people were still asleep. There was usually a credential hanging from the mirror, a laptop bag on the passenger seat and a succession of messages asking where I was, and I’d become good enough at Miami to know which roads would betray me at which times of day. That evening there was none of it. I left the office, threw my bag into the back of the car and followed the blue line on my phone towards the Argentine restaurant Tomás had chosen, arriving in the kind of traffic where motorcycles invented lanes, horns substituted for indicators and a man in a white pickup changed position three times in thirty seconds without appearing to get any closer to wherever he so urgently needed to be. I switched between radio stations for a while, caught bits of Spanish I understood and plenty I didn’t, then turned the thing off and drove in silence.

It felt strangely like work used to feel. Not Miami FC work, but the old work, when I’d arrive somewhere in the South with an address and enough time to take the long way there. Birmingham, Chattanooga, Hattiesburg, Athens; places I used to approach like there was going to be a test afterwards, collecting church signs and diners and water towers and the names of roads, convinced that if I wrote enough of it down I would eventually understand where I was. I’d been terribly earnest about all that, although I suppose young reporters are supposed to be. Miami had never really submitted to the same treatment. It was too big, too loud, too many places at once, and somewhere between arriving here and actually living here I’d stopped trying to turn every journey into material. Now I knew where to get coffee without writing down the name of the woman who served it. I had a dry cleaner. I knew which Publix I preferred. I had opinions on routes home. All terribly mundane things that probably said more about belonging somewhere than anything I’d managed to put into a notebook.

The restaurant occupied a unit in a strip mall, which felt right. Some of the best meals I’d eaten travelling through American soccer had come with views of nail salons, dentists and six-lane roads, and this one offered a parking space near the back and a walk through the remaining heat of the day. A family crossed ahead of me, the father carrying a sleeping girl over one shoulder while two boys chased one another between parked cars, and outside the restaurant an older man in an Argentina shirt was holding court beneath the awning while his wife appeared to have heard the story before. Music and conversation escaped whenever the door opened. I could see Tomás inside and realised, after a few seconds, that the small gathering around him wasn’t simply people waiting for a table. A couple wanted a photograph, another man shook his hand and then a boy stepped forward with his father. Two championships had apparently done something to the anonymity of Tomás Villalba in South Florida. I watched for a moment because there was something funny about remembering the young coach I’d first encountered when almost nobody outside his own little corner of the game had any reason to know his name. By the time I got inside, the crowd had dispersed enough for me to tell him he was famous. His response suggested that success hadn’t changed him too much.

He knew the restaurant well enough that introductions became unnecessary almost immediately. The waitress greeted him in Spanish, kissed him on the cheek and then turned her attention to me after Tomás explained that I was Daniel, el periodista. I corrected him out of habit and said I wasn’t really a journalist anymore, which prompted a conversation between the two of them that moved far too quickly for me to follow. According to Tomás, she had expected me to look younger. I never established whether she’d actually said that or whether he was amusing himself, but either seemed plausible. He ordered empanadas before I’d properly looked at the menu and later took responsibility for the steak and wine too, decisions I had learned weren’t worth contesting with an Argentine. There was football playing silently above the bar, framed shirts and photographs of Buenos Aires around the walls, and enough noise from the kitchen and surrounding tables that neither of us had to worry about filling every silence. For the first hour, perhaps longer, nothing particularly important happened, and I’m glad it didn’t. We ate, talked about the season and laughed about people and matches that had once felt enormously consequential and were already becoming stories.

Tomás being Tomás, even his final game at Miami had given him something to complain about. There had been a period where the distances weren’t right, somebody had vacated a space they shouldn’t have and apparently the presence of a championship trophy at the end of the afternoon did not absolve anybody from these crimes. From there came Castillo and Spielman, Soñora, the academy boys, members of staff, people who’d already left and others who would probably follow. Eventually we worked backwards far enough to reach Knoxville and my earliest attempts to talk football with him. Tomás remembered these rather more clearly than I would have liked. I remembered returning to hotels afterwards and searching for words he’d used because I hadn’t wanted to admit I didn’t understand them: half-space, third man, rest defence, all this vocabulary that I’d once suspected football people had invented to make a simple sport sound more important. Years later I was sitting across from the same man discussing whether Miami had become too predictable when rotating down the left. There was probably something profound in that. Mostly, it made Tomás laugh at me.

California didn’t come up until the plates had gone and coffee arrived, by which point we’d spent a couple of hours successfully avoiding the reason I suspected he’d asked me there. San Diego had called. He explained enough for me to understand that it was serious, although there wasn’t much explaining required. MLS, more resources, a bigger club and another step along a career that had never really looked as if it would stop at Miami. He hadn’t quite said yes, or at least told me he hadn’t, but I’d spent enough time around him to know the difference between Tomás considering something and Tomás working out how to tell people he’d already decided. I told him I thought he’d be mad not to take it. Miami had been good to him and he’d been very good for Miami, but there wasn’t much left for either side to prove to the other after two championships. At some point around there he became uncharacteristically sincere and acknowledged that I’d been around for rather a lot of the journey, quickly clarifying that he wasn’t crediting me with any of the football before I became too pleased with myself. I told him he’d given me something worth writing about. He disagreed. As he saw it, I’d simply found something I liked writing about. I didn’t have much of an answer to that.

The question of whether I’d go with him arrived almost casually. There was no job offer and no great speech about needing me in California, just an acknowledgement that there would probably be ways of making it happen if I wanted them to. A few years earlier I don’t think I’d have needed much convincing. San Diego would have meant another city to learn, another football club, another collection of restaurants and roads and airport terminals, and another few years somewhere around the orbit of a man whose career had provided much of the structure for mine. Knoxville had become Greenville, Greenville had become Miami and I’d followed so naturally that I’d never really stopped to ask when following the story had become following Tomás. But sitting there that evening, I realised I didn’t particularly want another road handed to me. I liked Miami. I liked my work. I had, without really noticing it, acquired a life that existed perfectly well when Tomás wasn’t standing somewhere in the middle of it. So I told him I thought I’d stay. He nodded, said bien, and returned to his coffee with so little surprise that I wondered whether he’d invited me partly because he already knew what my answer would be.

We eventually walked back through the restaurant and into the parking lot, where the heat had softened but never really disappeared. Nobody stopped him for a photograph this time. Cars moved slowly through the plaza and an abandoned shopping cart rolled several feet before lodging itself against a curb. Tomás initially offered me his hand, which after all those years struck me as so ridiculous that I laughed at him, and we settled for the kind of brief hug neither of us would have wanted anybody to make too much of. I wished him luck, warned him against becoming unbearable in MLS and received an answer that suggested he considered that process already complete. Then he walked to his car and I walked to mine. There was no rain, no perfectly timed song and nothing particularly cinematic about the moment; he reversed out of his space, raised a hand through the windshield and joined the procession of red lights moving towards the road.

I stayed where I was for a few minutes. My old notebook was inside the bag on the back seat, no longer kept within reaching distance as it had been when I started all this, when every town seemed to contain something I was frightened I’d forget if I didn’t write it down immediately. There were years in those books now. Birmingham and Chattanooga, Hattiesburg and Athens, Nashville, Knoxville, Greenville and eventually Miami; stadiums and motel rooms, meals eaten alone, conversations I’d barely understood and people who’d gradually stopped being subjects and become friends. I thought about reaching back for it and writing something about Tomás disappearing into the traffic, then decided that was exactly the kind of thing the younger version of me would have done.

Instead I started the car. The phone gave me the quickest route home, I pulled out of the strip mall and, when it told me to turn, carried on straight.

I knew another way.