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Even so, I remember being struck by the general weirdness of seeing them up there, those familiar-looking Icelandic faces with their mispronounced Icelandic names. It was like seeing your best friend in a movie, very surreal and incongruous.We knew the odds were good that we'd get out of our group and into the last 16. Only six teams would be disqualified after the first round, and we'd be damned if we were going to be one of those six. Even so, it very much came down to the wire, as our entire group seemed incapable of decisively winning anything, and we squeaked into the second round with a narrow victory against Austria.I'm not saying that Iceland was particularly good, but you didn't have to be very good to beat England. You just had to be slightly less shit.
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But boy, was it simultaneously satisfying and infuriating when Iceland did win. English pundits exploded with vitriol over how embarrassing it all was, blaming the defeat on anything and everything without admitting to even the idea that Iceland had simply played a better game than England. I'm not saying that Iceland was particularly good, but you didn't have to be very good to beat England. You just had to be slightly less shit.And nothing underscored this better than France kicking our ass in the quarter-finals. France had until then been fairly unconvincing this year, with the closest thing to a real test in the tournament being a 0–0 draw against Switzerland, but the team really shone against Iceland. The star players finally delivered, and while Iceland fought valiantly until the end, making France earn the victory, the end result was never really in doubt.And watching that game was like a return to reality for me, like everything was normal again. Of course we lost to France in a Euro quarter-final. Why wouldn't we? We're Iceland. They're France. They won the World Cup once and the Euros twice, you know.But there was no sadness, no grim melancholy to it this time. The team had acquitted itself well, and making to the quarter-finals in your first ever European Championship is nothing to sneeze at. Also, the future is bright: Our old rival Croatia is the only real challenge in our World Cup 2018 qualifying group, and the colossal hype generated around Iceland's upset victory over England has all but ensured interest in our players among the world's more prominent league teams, which will in turn improve the quality of our national team. The best, one would hope, is yet to come.But 2016 has already given me my best Euros yet. Two long-shot teams have defied the odds (go Wales!) and made this a championship worth watching, only this time, one of those teams was from my home country. My dad called me long-distance after the England game. "Who'd have believed it, ten years ago?" "Not me, dad, not me." For just a month this summer, I got to be eight years old again, and I remembered what it feels like to believe. After all, anything's possible.Follow Sindri Eldon on Twitter.