A glimpse of heaven

It's only now, three or so days out from the game, that it all seems less like one sort of fantasy and more like another. Three days out from a match with tens of thousands in attendance, in a proper stadium, on the national stage, on national television. We've played at that stadium twice, once in front of almost nobody (not our fault), and another time in a derby against the Bergers in front of a few thousand that should have been more, but wasn't. Now mainstream TV is showcasing our presidents. Our players are being interviewed by the print media and on the radio. Even I'm being a media tart, with three appearances in various formats, my reputation lingering on despite being more than semi-retired from blogging. All this attention, and none of it yet for causing a scene. I think back to then president George Donikian's livelihood being threatened because of the shambles of the 2005 riot against Preston. I think of one of his successors, Leo Athanasakis, doing a doorstop TV news appearance to deny any connection of the club to the violent incidents at the water polo in 2007. I think of all our presidents having to suck up to the small-time and small-minded members of the local Greek press. You can justifiably cringe as hard as you want at the antics of current presidents Andrew Mesourouni and Bill Papastergiadis, but at least we only have to cringe, and not worry about anything worse, at least not yet. It feels like after over twenty years on the outside, that we've been given a chance to taste the good life, of where me might have been, and where we still might end up. Of course, come Sunday morning, we'll be where we have been since mid-2004, and the big show will roll on without us, as it has for the past twenty odd years. But win or lose, we will have had that moment in the spotlight again, where others will have seen us differently to what we've been painted as, and we get to see ourselves as we imagine ourselves to be, so different from the reality we have to live, as our self-delusion and self-aggrandisement coincide with a brief window of undisputed relevance.