“I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.”

That's the final line of Mary Oliver's poem When Death Comes. Mae, the pub owner who died in the previous episode, reads it at the end of Ted Lasso's fourth season. That's spoiler number one. More to come.

On the eve of my 42nd birthday, I sat down to write about an odd question: who won the Richmond women's team's final match of the season? And why did I care so much?

In the finale, Ted gathers the team before the game. He says someone is missing today: Mae. If the pubs in heaven have good Wi-Fi, he jokes, she'll be watching. Then the team walks onto the pitch. The stands are full. And that's it.

We never see the game. Not a single moment on the pitch. Nobody tells us the score. The clues suggest Richmond won, but the show leaves us to work that out for ourselves.

I didn't get it at first. Once it clicked, I loved the choice. Some things matter more than the final score. Even in football. Especially in football.

Of course I wanted to know how the match ended. You probably did too. But there was something else going on, something a scoreboard makes easy to miss. Ted remembered Mae before the game. She wasn't in the stands, but she still felt present to the team and everyone around them. In the final minutes, we heard her voice reflecting on a life lived with wonder.

So I found myself asking: how much does the final score really matter? Who won? What number lit up on the board?

The philosopher C. Thi Nguyen has a book called The Score. I've written about it before. It's about the way scoring systems can change our idea of a good result, and sometimes of a good life.

Look, being able to measure things is a gift. Numbers help us see change, compare options, and agree on what we're talking about. I work in analytics; I would be ridiculous to argue otherwise.

The trouble starts later. We invent a metric to keep track of something we care about, then watch that metric so closely that the thing itself starts to disappear.

We end up working for the number. The whole point was supposed to be the other way around.

In a way, our lives can feel like a Premier League season from Ted Lasso. At work, we get scored every month, sometimes every day. At home, we count steps, completed tasks, books read, weight gained or lost. Tiny scoreboards in our pockets tell us whether to feel good about ourselves.

Or bad.

A score can be useful. It gives a game structure and a goal. But that's all it is: the rules of the game. We also play because, damn it, we like playing. Life isn't a race to accumulate abstract points. Life is one hell of a game.

Here's a small example I love. In Denmark, results and league tables aren't published in children's football before U13. The kids still try to win. The adults leave them room to learn and enjoy the game without turning every weekend into a ranking.

Why should Danish kids have all the fun?

I still want to know the score of Ted's final match. But with my 42nd birthday around the corner, I'm more interested in another question. When this next year ends, will I remember what surprised me, what I got absorbed in, and who I felt good with?

What did I admire? Dream about? Laugh at? What did I admit, and to whom? What did I see for the first time, and what did I want to do again?

Why did I cry? Who did I say goodbye to? What made me sad? What did I keep coming back to in my mind? Where did I get burned, and what did I regret?

What did I play?

I hope I won't be able to recall the score off the top of my head. I hope I'll be able to say something more like this:

“I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.”