If you ever see me at a party, I’ll most likely be standing off to the side, looking slightly lost, staring down into my glass. Perhaps you’re that way too — introverted, awkward, thirsty. Nice to meet you. And since we’re here, may I introduce you to my friend Philip? Or perhaps you’ve already met.

The posthumous publication of Larkin’s letters revealed him to be something uglier than a garden-variety curmudgeon. The private expressions of misogyny, antisemitism and xenophobia he shared with friends have dented his reputation in the years since his death.

If he hasn’t been fully canceled, it may be because his gift for self-cancellation makes such censure redundant. Larkin writes from the standpoint of someone who is out of touch, out of step and out of sorts, with himself and everyone around him. He’ll never be the life of the party, and you may wonder why anyone invited him in the first place.

Nonetheless, it’s good to see him there. For one thing, it’s nice to know that someone might be having a worse time than you are. He even has a theory about why some people have a better time than others; in fact, he’s an expert on the subject.

Misery loves company, and this miserable chap turns out to be just the companion you’re looking for, at least until you can find another drink.

Center back Naomi Girma stole the show in Louisville as the U.S. women’s national team wrapped up the international window with its third win. But the real story of that October camp is the sheer amount of evaluation head coach Emma Hayes managed in addition to the celebratory nature of the team’s Olympics gold medal victory tour.

“I got out of it what I wanted to get out of it,” Hayes said Wednesday. “A ton of debutants, managed minutes for everyone that’s still in NWSL play, (and) a chance to develop some things that, for us, we set as targets for ourselves on the training pitch.”

Hayes has backed up everything she has said since taking over the job in May, going back to her first media appearances in New York City this spring — specifically: club form matters. While her hands were tied slightly in this window as Olympics celebrations meant she had to call up every healthy member of the squad that went to the Games in France in the summer, she used her remaining roster spots to the fullest. She also maximized rotation, not just in the starting line-ups and her substitute choices, but the 23-player game-day rosters.

All seven uncapped players on the roster, including a mid-camp addition, earned their first USWNT minutes.

Orlando Pride defender Emily Sams and Washington Spirit midfielder Hal Hershfelt were in France as alternates but did not see the field. Racing Louisville forward Emma Sears immediately impressed in her debut as only the fourth player in program history to record a goal and assist in her first cap. Bay FC defender Alyssa Malonson nabbed her first assist in her debut Wednesday against Argentina, playing provider to Girma. Paris Saint-Germain’s Eva Gaetino, Utah Royals’ Mandy Haught and Gotham FC’s Yazmeen Ryan rounded out the new kids.

3 – Three different #USWNT players (Eva Gaetino, Mandy Haught & Alyssa Malonson) will be starting in their national team debut in the same game for the first time since four did so on March 7, 2001 against Italy. Newcomers. pic.twitter.com/mzv4oVFFUL

— OptaJack⚽️ (@OptaJack) October 30, 2024

There were important returns too. Alyssa Thompson finally scored her first international goal in her return to the national team after missing out on the Olympic roster, and Ashley Sanchez and Hailie Mace picked up minutes against Argentina.

It’s hard to disagree with Hayes’ approach to club form after a successful window because she achieved all of her objectives and captured three multi-goal wins. As a bonus, she also finally saw the team down a goal, forced into mounting a comeback against Iceland in Nashville on Sunday. It was the first time the USWNT had fallen behind in a game managed by Hayes.

The challenge now is figuring out how much these matches actually matter in the long run. While the friendlies were fun to watch — no one will complain about a Girma brace either — with so much focus on rotation and evaluation, it feels more like one of the first pieces to the larger puzzle. One that won’t be completed for a few more years.

The back half of 2024 has generally felt like a period for recovery and big-picture thinking at the senior team level.

While the next and final window of the year in late November and early December involves two high-profile European opponents on the road, the friendlies against England and the Netherlands will likely be an outlier from this period. Higher-profile opponents mean higher stakes, but it’s fair to expect Hayes to again use the full depth of her roster with an eye on evaluation and development.

Our last home game of the year did not disappoint! ⚡

A sold-out stadium, three international debuts and two goals by center back extraordinaire Naomi Girma! #USWNT x @JimBeam pic.twitter.com/ab7bcLUX8u

— U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team (@USWNT) October 31, 2024

Hayes has already shown she’s not afraid of big moments and prioritized using the depth of her roster to bring Jaedyn Shaw, Croix Bethune and others to their first major tournament this summer. While the starting XI against England on November 30 is sure to be the strongest possible, Hayes has another chance to ensure that players who will be crucial to the team’s success two or three years down the line experience an environment like Wembley Stadium as well.

The true sign of things to come will be January’s Futures Camp, which Hayes promised to run concurrently with the full senior team camp in Los Angeles. The USWNT hasn’t run a talent and identification camp since 2019, shortly after Vlatko Andonovski took over the team, but it was the only one to occur during his four-year tenure.

Hayes has promised to cast a wide net, especially following semifinal appearances from the under-20 and under-17 teams in their respective World Cups this year. But for all the angst over the past few years about generational change, the runway has finally been fully cleared.

The Olympics were the most obvious symbolic gesture of the end of one USWNT era, with Alex Morgan not named to the roster. It was a surprise sunsetting of a generational player but was also a testament to the team she helped build.

There are more options than ever before in every position. Making the U.S. roster seems harder than it’s been in the past, but doing so is also more clearly tied to form and thus more transparent than ever. Hayes has finally truly buried that “emergency surgery” line she came in with and led the team to Olympic gold, and as promised, the larger work is now underway.

These three games provided a good start, but were just a start nonetheless.

The first 270 minutes of the cycle leading to the 2027 World Cup in Brazil and home-turf Los Angeles-hosted Olympics a year later are in the bag. There’s still so much more to come.

(Top photo: Scott Wachter / Imagn Images)

Ed Cubberly had never heard of Anthony Hopkins when he received a phone call from Kathleen Gerlach, the assistant costume designer on a movie he knew nothing about. It was 1989, and the film version of “The Silence of the Lambs” was two years from becoming a critical and commercial sensation.

Cubberly, a full-time nurse at the time, living in Bayonne, New Jersey, had a side business making masks for NHL goalies from 1988 to 2000. Mike Richter, Frank Pietrangelo and Mark Fitzpatrick were among the players who wore his products.

So how did he get drawn in to help create one of film’s all-time villains?

At one point in the late 1980s, Cubberly left a business card at Gerry Cosby & Co. Sporting Goods in Manhattan. Not long after, members of the “The Silence of the Lambs” prop department went to the shop looking for a mask. They walked away with Cubberly’s contact information.

Gerlach reached out to Cubberly about making a mask — not for hockey but for what would become a classic scene in the movie. And thus began Cubberly’s lone foray into film and his connection to Anthony Hopkins’ portrayal of Hannibal Lecter, whom the American Film Institute ranks as the No. 1 movie villain of all time.

“My 15 minutes of fame,” Cubberly says now. “I guess it turned out OK.”

Midway through “Silence of the Lambs,” Lecter speaks to a senator while strapped to a gurney. He is a serial killer notorious for eating his victims, but he’s also a brilliant psychiatrist with information that could help catch another serial killer, Buffalo Bill. As he speaks to the senator, whose daughter has been kidnapped by Buffalo Bill, he wears a straight jacket and a fiberglass mask that covers his nose and the lower half of his face.

There’s an opening over his mouth covered by three metal bars — a measure against a potential cannibalistic outburst.

That was Cubberly’s finished product: the most famous mask he ever made, with all due respect to the Statue of Liberty mask that New York Rangers goalie Mike Richter wore in the 1994 Stanley Cup Final.

“It was kind of devious and scary looking,” says Cubberly, now 67. “It fit the scene perfectly.”

When enlisting Cubberly’s help, Gerlach gave him a description of the scene. Cubberly came up with the concept in only a few minutes, using a Sharpie to draw the design on a picture of one of his old masks. He interpreted Gerlach’s instructions as instructions to give Lecter a muzzle, which led to the mouth covering. He also added a pair of holes over the nostrils.

Cubberly was in contact with Gerlach and future Academy Award-winning costume designer Colleen Atwood throughout the process. At one point, they asked what he was thinking for the mask’s color. Cubberly suggested keeping the fiberglass’s greenish-tan shade. It would look like something that could have been made in jail, he told them. Director Jonathan Demme loved the idea, Cubberly recalls.

“I was just trying to get out of painting the thing,” he says with a chuckle.

Cubberly never met Hopkins, who won an Oscar for his performance. The film’s prop crew mailed him a plaster mold of the actor’s face, which he still has. Cubberly sculpted clay over the mold, then built the fiberglass mask over the clay. The process took only a couple of days.

The costume department had Hopkins try out different types of masks before filming. One looked like a beekeeper’s mask. Others were more cage-like. Cubberly’s design proved most effective.

“It looked nothing like any of the other masks,” he says.

The scene is similarly unique — and tense. Dramatic string music plays as Lecter is wheeled forward, and Hopkins makes piercing eye contact with the senator as he toys with her throughout the conversation.

Cubberly doesn’t watch many movies, but he and his wife went to “The Silence of the Lambs” when it came out in theaters. He didn’t know exactly when his mask would make an appearance. The second it did, he jumped from his seat and let out a cheer.

The other patrons hissed at him to sit down.

“I made that mask for the movie!” he told them.

No one in the theater believed him. Why would they think the mask came from New Jersey?

Cubberly, who now lives in Frenchtown, New Jersey, received $400 in payment for the mask. He also maintains copyright over the design. That’s gotten him some extra cash over the years. He’s signed contracts with Halloween costume companies allowing them to reproduce the mask.

Billy Crystal wore the original while hosting the Oscars in 1992, making a joke that he looked like the goalie from the Screen Actors Guild hockey team.

Cubberly hasn’t seen the original in person since he shipped it from New Jersey to Pittsburgh, where most of the movie was filmed.

“It’s a question I get all the time,” he says. “I have no idea where it is.”

He does, however, have a gift from the man who wore it. After making the mask, he asked the film’s prop crew if he could get something signed by Hopkins. They granted the request, mailing him a photo of Hopkins wearing the mask. He keeps the photo framed on his wall.

“To Eddie,” Hopkins scrawled at the bottom of the picture, “All good wishes — and be very careful on dark nights, Eddie, because I’ll be waiting and watching.”

Hopkins signed the picture twice: once with his own name and once with the name of the character Cubberly helped give his iconic look: Dr. Lecter.

(Top photo: Rodin Eckenroth / Getty Images)