If you’d asked Jim what he expected out of the next day’s rugby league match, he’d have said he expected something similar to the rugby union game earlier in the week: Pam getting super involved and him sitting back and enjoying her enjoyment. In fact, that had been the theme of each of the last few days; he was getting as much if not more bliss out of this relationship simply from being able to actually show how much he enjoyed her pleasure (in every sense) as from his own active enjoyment of their various activities. That didn’t mean he hadn’t been enjoying himself anyway: the rugby union game had been good, the Beethoven concert was honestly the best he’d ever heard, and the days (and nights) he was spending with Pam were wonderful.

It was just that watching her actually have fun too, and getting to be an active part of that, and not just sit around on the sidelines and hope she’d notice him, was a rush he had never known before, and so he was high on it all the time.

Hopefully, he thought afterward, the rugby league game was like that for her.

For reasons he could never adequately explain, not even after he bought himself a subscription to a streaming video service that let him watch the games back in Scranton, rugby league spoke to Jim Halpert. Maybe it was the caveman in him that loved watching a scrum restart play. Maybe it was the  sheer physicality of the running and tackling without helmets, much in the way of pads, or any concern for the players’ frail human bodies. Maybe it was simply that having watched a game of rugby union a few days earlier, he was better prepared to understand the nuances of rugby league today. Whatever it was, he found himself transported by the fluid action of the game, and not (to his surprise) missing the forward pass or the highly structured timing of American football at all. On the contrary; it seemed like almost the basketball of football to him, a balletic (if still violent) game where motion and position mattered more than pre-planned maneuvers or even brute force. There was also an element that reminded him of ultimate Frisbee, when after a tackle the defenders moved back away from the ball, that kept things flowing and exciting.

He was aware of Pam next to him also enjoying the match, and they agreed on the same side to support so there was no conflict there. But at the same time he experienced something akin to the thrill he experienced at a 76ers game or the one blessed time Mark’s parents had indulged him with two tickets to March Madness and they’d road-tripped out for the first- and second-round games in Philly. He was awash in the sport of it, and the collective effervescence of the crowd, and while Pam’s presence was as always a balm to his soul, he was joyously connected to every single member of the crowd.

He spent much of the rest of the day talking to her about the game (fortunately she was a good sport and let him prattle on as much as he liked) and decided that he was, all in all, quite indebted to that one prosy guy at the box office who’d sold him those tickets back when he’d just been a depressed single man wandering aimlessly around Sydney.

**

Pam had always hated it when Roy got so into a game that he lost track of everything else. She appreciated, of course, the pleasure of fandom and of live sports in particular, but there was something about the way he ignored the world to focus on what was in front of him that made her feel pushed away and ignored. Maybe it was a holdover from their first date, when he’d proven that that was an actual possibility; maybe it was just the way he seemed to assume that food and beverages would just appear in his hand without his doing anything, and act surprised when she expected him to get his own; maybe it was the sense that he didn’t really care if she was there at all, as long as he got to enjoy his sports.

She did not feel that way with Jim, even as she could feel him getting pulled into the action in a genuine, spirited way. With Jim she felt elevated, not used; drawn into his excitement rather than nibbling around the outskirts of it for attention. While in the rugby union game she had decided that fandom was the better part of valor, and would increase her enjoyment, at this match she just let Jim’s enthusiasm carry her, and surfed the wave of his emotion with him. Roy got introverted and almost sullen, even when his team was winning, with the exception of extreme outbursts of passion when something extremely good or bad happened. Jim, on the other hand, was a bubbling fount of happiness, sharing that joy with her constantly with almost childlike vigor—“did you see that?” was his native state, just as a furrowed brow was Roy’s, and he high-fived her every time a “cool thing” happened, in his words.

She was vaguely aware that she might have been embarrassed in another life, since he was just so excited that it was a bit over the top. But who cared? They were in Sydney, Australia. They’d never see these people again. And Jim was having fun. Hell, she was having fun. It was fun.

The fun washed over her, and she let it do so, and it was almost as good as the Beethoven had been.

It wasn’t as good, but then again, what would be? Even a second day of Beethoven would never be the first time she listened to music in the Sydney Opera House again.

But every day could be the first time she did something. And this was a pretty damn good something to have chosen—especially since Jim loved it so much.