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He navigated to "Career Mode," but his finger hovered over a different option. A hidden one. You had to press L1, R1, Triangle, and Square three times on the sponsor screen. It was a cheat code his older brother, Luca, had discovered the week before he left for the army.

He looked at the menu again. New Game. Load Game. Options. No Memory Mode . There never had been. He’d made up the code years ago, a desperate fiction to hear his brother’s laugh one more time.

There, on the virtual pitch, a pixelated Del Piero was lining up a free kick. Matteo remembered this game. Luca had been winning 3-1 with ten minutes left. Matteo had wanted to quit. Luca had refused.

But as he moved to turn off the console, the screen flickered. The static returned. A new text box appeared, written in the chunky, poorly translated English of the original game:

The recording ended with the sound of two brothers screaming, the camcorder shaking, and their father’s voice from the hallway: “Silenzio! Domani è scuola!”