If Only We Could Bottle That Feeling
People often ask what the happiest moments of my life have been.
The standard, expected answers usually top the list. Meeting my partner. Watching my sons being born. Some family holidays.
But one of the top ten moments of my entire life happened on a Saturday afternoon in September.
Esteban Cambiasso making it 3–3 for Leicester City against Manchester United.
Not the winner. The equaliser.
If you're not a football fan, that probably sounds ridiculous. But anyone who has supported the same club for decades will understand. Sometimes sport creates emotions that are almost impossible to explain to anyone outside it.
The Obsession
I had bought our season tickets just a few months earlier, right on the back of our promotion to the top flight. I knew that without them, I had little to no chance of taking my two young sons to a game. Demand was through the roof.
I wasn't looking for history; I just wanted to lock in around twenty father-and-son days out that we could share, hopefully for many years to come. At nine and eleven, children seem to change by the week. You think you have endless Saturdays just like this ahead of you, but the window slams shut incredibly fast.
Because of that, buying those season tickets became an obsession. The online system kept crashing and I spent three days repeatedly refreshing the page. By the time I finally got through, the cheaper family seats had gone. Rather than give up, I swallowed hard and bought much more expensive seats in another stand.
A year or so before, I’d taken my eldest to his very first game—an amazing 5–1 win over Doncaster. As we left the stadium, I was quick to manage his expectations. I told him that a 5–1 win was completely unrepresentative of reality. I explicitly warned him that the life of a Leicester City fan was much more likely to involve grinding, miserable 2–1 defeats on cold Tuesday nights.
Neither of us knew we were standing at the beginning of one of the most extraordinary periods in Leicester City's history.
The Explosion
When Manchester United came to town in September 2014, we were just hoping to hold our own against a global giant. Instead, we got a chaotic rollercoaster. We'd been behind, then level, then behind again. The atmosphere was electric.
Then, Cambiasso swept home the equaliser to make it 3–3.
The stadium simply exploded.
For a few seconds there was nothing else in the universe.
No mortgages.
No work.
No unread emails.
No lingering worries about tomorrow.
Just pure, weightless joy. We were hugging and cheering, caught up in the absolute chaos of the stands.
As the noise swirled around us and the stadium literally shook, I turned to my eldest son and told him that this single moment had just repaid the entire cost of both our season tickets. The expensive seats I had reluctantly paid for a few months earlier suddenly felt like the biggest financial bargain of my life.
If someone had invented a way of bottling that specific feeling, I'd probably have paid almost anything for it.
The funny thing is that the two goals that followed, giving Leicester a famous 5–3 victory, weren't quite the same. The equaliser released something inside thousands of people. The winner simply confirmed it. The equaliser was the shock of the impossible becoming possible.
"Friends Before Football"
What made the day even more special was that I shared it with my eldest.
Sadly, my younger son wasn't there. He'd chosen to go to a friend's birthday party instead. Beforehand, he gave what was, to be fair, an entirely sensible explanation for anyone, let alone a nine-year-old: "Friends before football."
After hearing the result later that evening, he looked at me and said, "I didn't know it was going to be one of the best games ever."
Exactly. None of us ever know.
Life never tells us which ordinary day is about to become extraordinary.
When I spent those three frustrating days online trying to buy tickets, I thought I was just buying a standard package of football matches. I had absolutely no idea that we were about to witness and share that 5–3 win, the Great Escape, a miraculous 5000–1 Premier League title, and several seasons playing the giants of Europe.
The Cost of Waiting
That's true of football, but it's the definitive rule of life as well.
We don't know which normal Sunday roast will become the last family meal before someone isn’t here. We don't know which rainy weekend getaway will become the holiday everyone still talks about twenty years later. We don't know which casual walk, brief conversation, routine round of golf, or afternoon with our grandchildren will quietly become a treasured memory.
If we knew in advance, we'd never miss them. We would cancel every conflict, clear our diaries, and show up. But life doesn't hand out itineraries for those magical moments we never see coming.
That's why waiting for "a better time" can be such an expensive habit.
One more year of work.
One more year before taking the trip.
One more year before buying the sports car.
One more year before seeing old friends.
Sometimes waiting is the right, pragmatic decision. Sometimes it isn't. Because life doesn't tell you in advance which days will alter your timeline or leave a permanent mark on your heart.
Looking back, those season tickets may have been one of the best financial decisions I ever made—not because they generated a financial return, but because they bought experiences that have appreciated in value every year since.
One Saturday afternoon in September 2014 unexpectedly became one of mine. Not because Leicester beat Manchester United. It was because, for a few wonderful seconds, everything else disappeared—and I was exactly where I needed to be, sharing it with my son.
Perhaps the best investments we ever make aren't the ones that grow our wealth—they're the ones that grow our memories.
Enjoyed this article?
Join Tomorrow's Notes for one thoughtful email every Friday with ideas about money, time and living well.