Although we had tickets for the Champions League match against Porto on Tuesday, what we did not have was tickets for Saturday’s Premier League match against Brentford.

We participated in the ballot, the process by which Arsenal creates a lottery for tickets, without success. We happily noted that Arsenal prioritizes people who participated in the Brentford ballot for tickets that are made available on its official Exchange site for resale.

And for the past three weeks, my husband and I each committed far too many moments of our day logged into the Arsenal ticket exchange, endlessly clicking the button for tickets, shifting from a request for 2 tickets together, to 2 tickets apart, to 1 ticket.

We fully agreed early on that the goal is to be in the stadium. Having a good seat is not a requirement. Being together is not a requirement. Even if only one of us is in the stadium.

I clicked the button while in meetings. I clicked the button while eating. I clicked the button while taking a walk. I clicked the button in the dead of night.

I went nowhere without my credit card, because you know the minute a ticket becomes available, you have to buy it.

About three days into the project, wondering whether it was possible that the web site was broken, a ticket came up as available. I had selected that I only needed one ticket and so I looked a gift horse in the mouth and tried to see if there were two tickets. There was not. And, also, the one ticket that had been available–now gone.

It was two weeks of clicking later before another ticket became available. This time I did exactly as the app told me with no delay: I went to the map to select the ticket. When I arrived at the map, the ticket was already gone.

Last Wednesday, two tickets were shown to me as available and again I went to the map. This time I managed to find one of the tickets on the map. And then the map resized and the ticket could never be found again. I tried fruitlessly to manipulate the map. It was on 20-second delay and just as I would see the ticket, it would again move from my view.

Then both tickets were gone.

On Thursday, one ticket was shown to me as available. I went to the map, I found it, and I clicked on it. It showed a green checkmark. Amazing!

And then….. Well, nothing. I did not have a ticket somehow.

A few days into the exercise, I started looking at commercial ticket resale sites. And I found them to be pretty scary. I looked at all the reviews and it seemed like some people had success and others had none. They lost money and, worse, got no tickets. So, I did nothing more than watch for supply and demand. Over the time I watched, ticket prices rose. More recently, they started to come down. They were still expensive, but looking more and more like we should consider them as an option. Especially as it seemed that actually succeeding on the Arsenal-sanctioned website was seemingly impossible. Even if a ticket came up, we could not actually have it.

By the time we boarded our flight Friday, we still did not have tickets to the match. My husband had no problem with this. But I did have a problem. We were going to be in London in time for the match, but not see the match. When we landed, I tried several more times on the Arsenal ticket exchange with no luck. At the border, I told my husband I wanted to buy a ticket on Stubhub. He encouraged me to go ahead, but had no intention of buying a ticket for himself that way. So I found a ticket, made the offer to buy it, and that set in motion a complicated process to actually have the electronic version loaded to my electronic wallet, as is required to get into the match.

While we were in the train from Heathrow, when we were changing stations, and back on the train, I was working hard with the seller to settle the obstacles we encountered. I started to realize how stupid it was to have tried to buy tickets this way.

Suddenly, I realized how we could accomplish the final step successfully. It worked. I thanked the seller for his help. He responded, “Thanks bro no problem hope you enjoy the game.”

Meanwhile, my husband, the Arsenal rule follower, had found a ticket on the official Arsenal exchange and successfully bought it. By the time we arrived at our hotel, we both had tickets. I had one up high in the West stands. My husband had one at the club level on the East side. In the end, his ticket, a much better ticket than mine, was cheaper to acquire.

Once I had my ticket in my electronic wallet, I tried one more time on the Arsenal exchange. It was 3.5 hours before the match and 2 tickets were available, at last. And I actually could have selected either one and it would have worked to buy them. Probably 2,000 clicks since I first started trying.

We got over to The Emirates after a quick sandwich at Pret a Manger. I was nervous as hell that my ticket might not scan. Or that it was in the Youth Enclosure. Or any number of other problems. But I had made my bed and was going to have to sleep in it. My husband and I found my entrance and I held my breath through the scanner.

I was in.

I think that was the first time I felt relaxed in three weeks. I went up, up the stairs to the top of the stadium and bought a Camden Hells Lager. It tasted like success.

Once I got to my seat I didn’t talk to a single person on either side of me, but I felt like I was with my people. There was group frustration with Brentford’s time wasting, most of it by faking injuries. There were hugs after the first goal, a lovely one by our new guy Declan Rice. There was shock when our goalkeeper, Aaron Ramsdale, made a horrific mistake right before halftime, caught of two minds when he dawdled with the ball under pressure and ended up hitting the ball off of the body of a Brentford player and into his own net. There was a lot of support for Ramsdale when he left the field, which was really nice to see.

And then, because the score was tied again at the beginning of the second half, all that time wasting by Brentford again. It for sure looked like it was going to end in a tie, when at last there was a breakthrough. Ben White put a nice high ball near the front of the goal and our other new guy, Kai Havertz, managed to head it into the roof of the net, possibly off the keeper’s hands.

Lots of hugs in my area, all around.

Then came the only time wasting of the night that we appreciated. Martin Odegaard was subbed off. Because he’s Arsenal’s captain, he has to pass the captain’s armband to another player when he leaves the match. He found the farthest player from him on the field to take the responsibility, Jesus. We loved it.

We had to hang on for what seemed like ages. Another ball went back to Ramsdale near the end (by then he had made a bunch of really nice saves) and he looked a little shaky. After that, I spoke to my seat mate to the left for the first time. I had to apologize for grabbing his arm and wailing when I thought Ramsdale was going to mess it up again. The seat mate was very understanding.

Arsenal ended the night at the top of the league for the first time in a long, long time.

We returned to the hotel and, for the first time, I could appreciate the hotel’s location, right next to the Thames. Perfect night in London.