Wales fans created magic in the stadium in Bordeaux

BORDEAUX -- A packed football stadium is a magical thing in a very literal sense: it can do magic. In the Stade de Bordeaux on Saturday evening, tens of thousands of people watched 22 people plus substitutes playing football. And, as these things go, it was a pretty good game: the red team took the lead, the blue team pegged them back, and then the red team scored again. Hooray!

At the same time those same tens of thousands of people — and those 22 footballers plus substitutes — were both subjects of and contributors to the great and terrible thing called an atmosphere. From the simple alchemy of collecting people together and giving them something to watch and respond to, something they care about deeply, comes great waves and tides of emotion, and highs and lows not normally achievable without chemical assistance. To attend a game in which one is invested is to invite — enthusiastically, willingly, sometimes at great personal expense — what could, were it not so much fun, be considered a deeply peculiar kind of psychic torture. Giving Chris Coleman the keys to your heart, your soul and your holiday mood might seem a good idea when buying the tickets, but in the moment, it was frankly exhausting.

A footballing atmosphere is, essentially, the fluctuating dynamics of shared nervous tension, as expressed through singing, muttering and calling the referee a useless prick. The big shifts are obvious: When Slovakia, for example, suddenly found a gap in the Welsh defence that simply shouldn't have been there, strolled through and equalised, that was a fairly straightforward up or down. Shrieks of joy or a stunned silence, depending on your calling.

But everything feeds into it, tweaks it, even the most minor of moments. A careless piece of control in a harmless area or a couple of misplaced passes, say, tiny errors that would be forgotten almost immediately, were it not for the fact that suddenly every shout of "Come on Wales" seems to carry a new, faint trace of terror. One Wales fan, high up in the second tier, spent 10 solid minutes of the second half — Slovakia's best 10 minutes, the 10 minutes when it looked like Wales might collapse in on themselves — saying nothing beyond "on his touch" followed by "fuck's sake." Not shouting it, in the faint hope that somebody on the pitch might hear. Just repeating it, over and over. A mantra. A rosary. On his touch. Fuck's sake.

That the events on the pitch change the mood off it is fairly self-evident. Football crowds are impulsive creatures. It's the flow back in the other direction that's interesting. Misty-eyed reminiscence, in the years to come, will assert a causal link between the Welsh fans realising that their team, post-equaliser, was being driven backwards, rising to their feet and belting out their anthem, and the Welsh team's subsequent rally on the pitch. And they may be right to; certainly Gwlad! Gwlad! rolled and boomed and echoed around Bordeaux's box of a stadium, the sound kept inside by the low-slung roof. It felt extraordinary to hear it, to be part of it. It seems obvious that to play for it, to play with it, to hear it and to know that this is for you, might also feel extraordinary in some performance-sharpening way. It worked, too. Five minutes later, Wales had their winning goal.

Alternatively, we might find an explanation in managerial tweaking: The introduction of Hal Robson-Kanu and Joe Ledley brought on the eventual goalscorer, rescued Gareth Bale from his thankless striking job and injected a little more energy into Wales' resistance. Or in fortune. Slovakia did hit the post, after all. Or, perhaps, in all three along with everything else you can think of, blended together into one messy and inconclusive whole. Football matches are players moving around on the pitch and events unfolding, one after the other until the end, and have to be understood as such. But they are also, in moments such as these, vast experiments in communal existence, in shared humanity, in the strange forces that bind us all to each other. And a world in which 25,000 people singing doesn't exert some mysterious, magical power seems a world barely worth bothering with.

"It was like a home game today," said Bale after the event. "The anthem lifted us," said Ramsey. At least we know they could hear us. And at least we know they believe in magic.