When the match ended and Brazil was behind them, Ståle Solbakken did not run toward his players. He walked toward the stands and melted into a long embrace with his loved ones, the kind that does not celebrate a result: it celebrates being there to see it.
Few embraces in this World Cup carry so much weight. Because that man already knows what it is not to be there.
On March 13, 2001, during a Copenhagen training session, his heart stopped. Just like that, without warning. He was 33 years old and was clinically dead for seven minutes, lying on the grass, while the club doctor brought him back to life with nothing but cardiac massage. He woke up with his career over and a pacemaker for life.
Anyone would have walked away from football, that profession that nearly killed him. He did the opposite: he sat down on a bench and never got up again.
A quarter of a century later, that heart assisted by a machine has just taken Norway —absent from the World Cups for 28 years— into the planet’s best eight, toppling none other than Brazil. The same Brazil he faced as a player in 97, in that legendary victory. Life, when it wants to, writes in circles.
That is why the embrace with his family is worth more than the scoreline. The seven minutes he was dead taught him what many understand too late: you lead with your head, you win with your legs, but you live with the people waiting for you at the end of the match.
His heart stopped once. Yesterday it beat for five and a half million Norwegians