Next February, roughly 100,000 people will stream into the Melbourne Cricket Ground for an event they've been dreaming about for months.
They'll fly halfway across the country and dress up in outfits they've been planning meticulously with their friends and carry colourful signs they've made at home with glitter pens and glue.
They'll squeeze onto train carriages from the city and swap stories with strangers wearing their own customised shirts, talking about their favourite memories and how excited they are to finally see their idol in real life.
They'll take selfies outside the stadium and wait patiently in line with tens of thousands of others, illuminated in the glow of the giant neon signs showing one of the world's most powerful women.
But who exactly will they be there to see? Taylor Swift or the Matildas?
Well, at this point, it could be either.
The past few months have seen Australia's women's national football team enter a celebrity stratosphere not experienced by many other sporting teams in our collective history.
While the Matildas' popularity had been rising steadily since 2019, it had a rocket booster strapped to it over the past year as the team prepared for and participated in their home Women's World Cup, with their historic fourth-placed finish breaking all sorts of audience records, be they in the stands or on our screens.
The hype faded slightly after the tournament as the players disappeared back to club-land, but the team's return to Australia for their Olympic-qualifying games over the past two weeks rekindled the country's obsession with the Matildas, with their three sellout games in Perth serving as confirmation that the team has now entered what can arguably be called their Taylor Swift Era.
The "Swiftification" of the Matildas isn't just visible in the growing number of people attending games or watching on television, though. It's also evident in the way the players have popped the bubble that has kept football relatively isolated from mainstream Australia, its media, and its cultural conversations.
During the World Cup, a colleague remarked to me that they no longer had to use the prefix "Matildas star" in their headlines about players because now everybody knew who Sam Kerr, Mary Fowler, Caitlin Foord, Ellie Carpenter, and Mackenzie Arnold were.
That familiarity has been a deliberate move on the part of Football Australia, which has invested heavily in making the Matildas as famous as possible.
Last year, they commissioned Disney to put together a six-part documentary on the team in the build-up to the World Cup. Like the Swift documentary that's also showing across Australian theatres, Matildas: The World At Our Feet took us into the private worlds of the players that many had only ever known on the football field, providing behind-the-scenes footage and exclusive interviews and stories about their childhoods that made audiences feel like they were just like us.
Their celebrity status has been turbocharged, in large part, by the team's captain, Sam Kerr, who is a marketing behemoth herself. The Chelsea forward's success on the field has catapulted her onto billboards and back pages, and made her face of Nike and FIFA video games.
She has almost transcended sport now, having received an Order of Australia medal, carried the Australian flag at the inauguration of King Charles, and handed the keys to the city of Perth.
She is now one of the most recognisable women in the country, and was even recently named Australia's most culturally powerful figure by the Australian Financial Review. If you asked a stranger who Sam Kerr was, chances are they'd know exactly who you were talking about even if they didn't care about football.
Football Australia has been reaping the rewards again and again.
Jersey sales during the Women's World Cup went through the roof, television viewer numbers eclipsed any other event in Australian history, and interaction with the Matildas' various social media platforms went galactic, all of which highlighted, like Swift's global fandom, the under-appreciated cultural and financial power of women fans in sport.
But Kerr's meteoric rise has come at a cost.
Such is her fame that — like Swift — she can barely go out in public without being swamped by fans begging for selfies and autographs. And so, over time, she has withdrawn into her own personal cocoon, carefully selecting her public appearances and rarely, if ever, giving interviews outside of those she's contractually obliged to do.
An interesting effect is now emerging involving the Matildas and the Swift-like fandom that's blossoming around them, where their incredible visibility and accessibility are tipping into intrusiveness into the players' lives, emotions, and personal spaces.
After the World Cup, players like Cortnee Vine and Mackenzie Arnold spoke about how they can no longer walk down the street without being recognised. And while most fans in these real-life settings are, by their own accounts, polite and accommodating, the online world can be far nastier, with Ellie Carpenter revealing the abuse she copped on social media after her performance against England in the semifinal.
More recently, the furore around fans holding up signs asking players to give them their match-worn jerseys or boots after games is another case in point. Anecdotally, many have observed the ways in which young fans almost demand items from the players as they make their traditional lap around the fences to take photos and sign autographs.
While these moments have provided inspirational fodder for the Matildas' social media channels, the consequence has been a growing number of fans asking for items that the players themselves may not want to part with, but potentially pressured to hand over thanks to the inspirational narrative that's been wrapped around them.
That feeling of entitlement to the players' lives has extended beyond football, too. Earlier this week, Mary Fowler was photographed with Penrith Panthers player Nathan Cleary amid rumours the two were in a relationship. Paparazzi-like photos captured the pair hanging out together in a park in Perth, with Cleary then filmed in the stands later that night as he watched the Matildas' game against Chinese Taipei.
Almost immediately, social media draw parallels between Fowler-Cleary and Taylor Swift's current relationship with NFL player Travis Kelce: two high-profile celebrities creating some unexpected fandom crossovers and creating headlines whenever they're spotted together in public.
Neither Cleary nor Fowler has confirmed or denied anything, and the fact that they have clearly made efforts to avoid media attention suggests they would rather keep their private lives just that — private.
However, such is the status of the Matildas now that their biggest stars can no longer take refuge in the public anonymity they had only a few years ago.
As the team's popularity continues to grow, will we be surprised if measures are put in place to prevent this kind of intrusion? Will the women's game — which has prided itself on its accessibility to the public — have to follow the path of the men's game, which keeps its fans largely at arm's length these days?
Will the Matildas' biggest players resort to shuffling from location to location in dark cars to avoid the leering camera lens of a voyeuristic media? Will this be the cost of the Swiftification of the Matildas?
And so we return to the MCG.
It's been suggested that Football Australia may try to stage the Matildas' home leg of their Olympic play-off qualifier against Uzbekistan in February at the stadium in order to squeeze in as many fans as possible, earning FA a pretty penny while also potentially breaking the record for the highest attendance at a women's sport event in Australian history.
Ironically, one of the biggest drawbacks of this proposal is that the game will take place barely a week after a Taylor Swift concert at the same venue, which will almost definitely affect the quality of the grass underneath the stage and the type of football that can therefore be played on it.
There's also the concern, from many football fans, that the MCG is not built for watching football because the seats are too far away from the action.
But do the floods of fans who are new to the Matildas really care about the football itself? Come February, will they care about the tactical adjustments made by Tony Gustavsson, the patterns and principles of play, the ways in which the team have become more variable in their attack and more resolute in their defence?
Will the 100,000 people who show up to the MCG a week earlier, dressed in homemade shirts and holding glitter-covered signs, care that they can't really see Swift from their seats in the nosebleeds?
Or do they just care about being in a stadium with countless others and sharing in a collective experience of seeing their idols in the flesh? What is sport if not entertainment anyway? And what are football fans if not Swifties dressed in particular colours?
Who, ultimately, gets to decide what the Matildas are and where their value truly lies? And, at this point, does the football itself factor in at all?
The Swiftification of the Matildas has already begun, with the team transcending sport in the same way Swift has transcended music.
From the waves of obsessed fans to the mainstream media coverage, to the viewership records, we are already starting to see the glittering effects of their superstardom.
But will there come a point at which the glue that has brought the team closer to their fans be the thing that pulls them apart?