Gemma McGowan, 40, from Liverpool. "I've been a Liverpool fan all my life. It's like a religion, Protestant or Catholic: You can't be both, you weren't allowed in our house to support anyone else. It's just the way you're brought up here." Abbie Trayler-Smith for ESPN

Her fear, fueled by memories of grieving mothers not that different from her, is a reminder that even in a year so full of joy, the past is never far from people's minds. Nearly every person I spoke to in Liverpool invoked or evoked the Hillsborough Disaster, maybe because 2019 marks the 30th anniversary and because the long-awaited trials of the responsible men have been shadowing this magical season.

Hillsborough has been the subject of multiple court and government inquiries, endless books and documentaries, and a phalanx of gossip and misinformation. The truth of what happened, long known in Liverpool, only recently came out in black and white, irrefutable and damning, after decades of fighting by the families of the dead, the survivors and their neighbors.

On April 15, 1989, LFC played in the semifinal of the FA Cup at Hillsborough Stadium in Sheffield and 96 Liverpool supporters died. The verb "died" doesn't encapsulate the horror, terror and pain of their final moments. Ninety-six men, women and children were crushed to death on live television, as many of the police and stadium officials who created the crush looked on cruelly, more concerned with blaming the dead than helping them. The youngest of the dead was 10.

The disaster touched nearly everyone in some way. Liverpool is a big city, yes, but it's also a small town. I met up one day with Peter Hooton of the seminal Liverpool rock band The Farm, and he was in the stands that day. Another man sat with me, talking about something completely different, until he mentioned that he'd been there that day, too. We both cried as he described some angel of a woman who lived near the stadium opening her door and offering him her phone; as a mom, she knew he'd have a mom at home wondering whether her son was one of the dead. He can still remember his aunt's scream of joy when she heard his voice on the other end, and his mother's tears of relief. Survivors all tell stories of doors opening and Sheffield mothers ushering Liverpool boys into their homes to make the most important phone call of their lives: Mum, I'm alive.

Ninety-six phones didn't ring.

The investigations into this loss of life determined a series of preventable things happened. The stadium hadn't been certified by the safety board. The government, on guard against Liverpool since fan charges caused a wall to collapse and kill 39 mostly Juventus fans at Heysel Stadium in Brussels in 1985, saw them as a menace. The police funneled everyone to a smaller set of turnstiles and created a bottleneck. That forced thousands through one tunnel, dangerously steep, which led to pens 3 and 4 behind the goal. The public-address system asked the fans already in those pens to move forward to make room. The pens on either side were nearly empty, but there wasn't a way to move from one pen to another. Nobody marshaled the crowd to the left or the right, so fans entered the only tunnel in sight.

As kickoff approached and the chaos became apparent, the policeman in charge, David Duckenfield, gave the order to open the outside gates and relieve the crush outside the stadium. Sgt. Michael Goddard radioed Superintendent Roger Marshall, "Open the gates," and at 2:52 p.m., gate C swung open and fans rushed in. The layout of the stadium and the bottleneck funneled everyone toward that dangerously steep tunnel into pens 3 and 4, and the people already in those pens, especially those at the front, were crushed. The best descriptions of what happened next comes from an oral history by beloved Liverpool novelist Kevin Sampson, who was in the stadium that day himself. I read half his book, "Hillsborough Voices," and had to put it down because it got too painful.

The Liverpool fans in pens 3 and 4 describe the inhuman cruelty of the police on the pitch looking at their friends die. A fan named Peter Carney stood trapped with numb legs and his arms trapped by his side, trying to concentrate on his breathing while a man next to him literally turned blue. He shouted at the officer to open a gate and let them out and the cop ignored him. Fans tried to climb the fence and get to safety, but the chain link was angled backward to keep them in. Everyone screamed at the police to open the gates. The cops didn't move. One officer looked at a fan named Damian Kavanagh and told him to get back. All this had its roots in English class divisions and how the working class were seen as animals to be caged, not fellow citizens to be helped, a thousand years of prejudice showing its face.

Finally some fans got over the fences onto the side of the pitch. They helped others. When Kavanagh got to the gate, a cop pushed him back and said, "You f----- t--t." Kavanagh ignored him and escaped. When he got home, he found a bruise on his back in the shape of a human hand, from the crushed person behind him. A Liverpool fan who worked as a fireman in London went down on the pitch to help with first aid. The dead and dying were strewn all over the pitch. The police formed a skirmish line across the middle of the field, and most just stood around and watched as Liverpool fans and a few first responders gave CPR and ripped down advertising signs to use as makeshift stretchers. This is all on video.

Some fans who got out of the stands alive were left to die as their families watched on television. One boy named Kevin Williams called out for his "mum" as he died, and his mother, Anne Williams, became the fiercest voice in demanding accountability from the authorities. Sampson's book is dedicated to her.

The government cover-up began almost immediately and has been documented extensively. If you listen to the broadcast, the announcers said the crush happened because Liverpool fans without tickets charged a gate and broke it open. Did the police tell them that? It's a lie that was told over and over again.

From the beginning, the strategy was to blame Liverpool.

The cops questioned grieving fathers and brothers, within literal seconds of identifying the dead bodies of sons and siblings, about their prematch alcohol consumption. A cop coldly stopped a grieving man from kissing his brother goodbye, calling the body "property of the coroner."

"He's my mother's son and the property of no one!" the man shouted.

The cop refused to let him say goodbye and pushed him out. The man threw such a fit that they finally let him inside for a moment, to tell his brother goodbye, before showing him out coldly again.

The brother told the cop, "I'm coming back to see him again tomorrow, and the day after, and I'll be coming back to see him every day until we bring him back home to Liverpool. He's not your property."

The battle lines had been drawn.

One officer admitted later under oath having told what he knew to be a lie about LFC fan behavior to a high-ranking politician who he knew would brief Margaret Thatcher, the prime minister who already hated Liverpool. The story he and so many others told ended up on the front page of the national tabloid The Sun under the headline "The Truth."

It accused Liverpool fans of urinating on the first-aid staff as they tried to save lives, and of causing the entire disaster through drunken gate-crashing violence, and even of pickpocketing the dead bodies of their fellow supporters. Behavior swaths of England believed about Liverpudlians, or Scousers, as they are known. "Because of the Heysel Stadium disaster," anti-Sun activist Paul Collins says, "we weren't just a working class; we were the violent, ugly, horrible working class. Forget about the Beatles, forget about the comedians, these Scousers are a horrible lot now. Now there's 96 people dead in a stadium. We'll just blame them. They're only Scousers anyway."

The national narrative was being cemented, would have been cemented, except for the families of the 96 and the people of Liverpool who decided to fight back.

At a memorial, the president of their rival Everton, Bill Kenwright, addressed the crowd at Anfield. He said he'd seen a banner recently at a Liverpool game that said, "You've taken on the wrong city," and when he read those words, he said another thought came to mind.

"You've taken on the wrong moms, too," he said.

Decades later, the day after that fight had finally been won, a Liverpool politician addressed Parliament and described the families of the 96. "They have prevailed against all the odds," he said, his voice cracking. "They have kept their dignity in the face of terrible adversity. They could not have shown a more profound love for those they lost. They truly represent the best of what our country is about. Now it must reflect on how it came to let them down for so long."

Today it is virtually impossible to find a copy of The Sun in the city and the only ones sold are kept under the counter, out of sight, like pornography. Most newsagents post signs in the windows letting shoppers know that they don't carry the largest paper in the country. Neither LFC nor Everton will credential reporters from the tabloid. Paul Collins, the man in charge of a local group called Total Eclipse of the S*n, met me at an Italian cafe on a side street.

"You could try for the week and won't find it," he says. "You could walk around every newsagent in Liverpool and you won't see it."

I wanted Paul to explain why his hometown kept fighting for so long against much more powerful entities like the politicians, the police and the press. His answers put Hillsborough in its proper context, at the end of a horrible decade. Like many American industrial cities, the 1970s hit Liverpool hard. Its famous docks and warehouses saw less and less freight, and its workers saw less and less work. Even today, the empty warehouses that once groaned with the spoils of empire sit abandoned, with urban forests growing inside the shells and peeking through the brick walls and window frames. In 1981, the riots in a working-class neighborhood named Toxteth brought national attention to Liverpool's desperation.

"Liverpool was on its knees in the '80s," Collins says. "It was on its knees because of unemployment, strikes, the riots, everything else."

Collins and I sipped coffee and talked about the history of the city. An old lady looking for a seat asked if she could join us. He glanced at me and asked her, "What do you think of The Sun?"

"I wouldn't dirty my hands with it," she spat.

We looked over at a mural of an old black-and-white photograph on the building across from us, of young boys sitting on a fountain nearby. The fountain is still there, but Collins looks at the faces, from around 1880 he guesses, when Liverpool was a booming port, and he thinks about how all those boys are dead now, and the docks died, too, and most of those jobs, but the city remains. Its people remain, and they are the ones whose voices have long ago made the Anfield Kop into a fearsome place that shakes and rumbles and roars.

Collins is an LFC supporter, a veteran of many Kop afternoons; he traveled away to Turkey to see Liverpool win its last Champions League: the miracle of Istanbul, it's called, from down 3-0 at the half to winning on penalties. "I went to Istanbul in 2005," Collins says, "one of the most famous nights in our history obviously. We were in a place called Taksim Square, center of Istanbul. Massive, absolutely massive square. God knows how many thousands and thousands of fans. Banners everywhere, and I'm just walking and reading banners, some of them are like, poetry, and you know, speeches from General De Gaulle, and it's crazy stuff. But the one that got me was, 'Damn Scousers Again.' And it just tickled me. We were back after 20 years. Back in the peak of European competition. Damn Scousers Again."

To be honest, that's what I thought about the next night when Man United played City: Damn Scousers Again. That Wednesday evening game put Liverpool in the odd situation of having to cheer for their biggest and most hated rivals. A United win or a draw and suddenly Liverpool would have the advantage over City in the title race. A chill had come to Liverpool and a rain fell, which left the streets around Anfield puddled and reflecting the streetlights.

I went to a pub called the Arkles within eyeshot of the stadium and found a table. The man sitting next to me, named Frank, read the local paper. He had YNWA tattooed on his right forearm. He lived nearby, like nearly everyone in the pub except me. A nursed Guinness sat on the table near the paper. Kickoff was less than an hour away.

"That's why I'm having a drink," he said. "To calm me nerves."

A couple in the corner ordered and opened a bottle of wine.

A man played darts.

A man moved around the psychedelic carpet with a manic energy.

"All the Evertonians are supporting City, and all the Reds are supporting United," he said with a laugh. "Something's not right."

Frank left to go watch at home. As ticket prices have risen, a lot of locals who once filled the Kop now build their game-day traditions around the house or pubs like this one. The couple drinking wine left 15 minutes before kickoff to watch at home, too.

"Come on, United!" the woman said to friends nearby.

United made a failed run early, and an old man wearing an LFC cap slammed his hand on the table. United almost scored 18 minutes in and someone yelled, "God f---ing hell. For f---s sake, piece of s---e."

At halftime, a young man with his girl bit his fingernails. Then City scored.

An old man exhaled hard, shook his head and said nothing.

The pub stayed quiet and when United missed an open goal, someone muttered, "Oh my God," and put their head in their hands. The person next to him covered their mouth in shock.

"Where's your heart?" someone screamed. "You haven't got any!"

"S---e!" someone said.

Then it got quiet.

Everyone slipped back out into the night, and I thought about their ancestors, the ones who came from Ireland, Scotland and Wales, and how they built a city and an empire and a spirit -- "Scouse not English," people like to say -- and whether you love LFC, or hate them, they walk through the world as their own people, which has got to be related to the crews on three centuries of ships, and the dockworkers who unloaded the raw materials and loaded the manufactured goods that built the modern world. I was thinking about the boys sitting on the fountain and about Paul Collins and how whatever inside him that makes him keep up that fight surely comes from his hometown.

Liverpool is full of left-wing, working-class activists with radical bookstores (that sell LFC books behind the counter, of course) and underground pubs with vintage Soviet posters on the walls. That political sense infuses the hard-core fan groups, who represent a city built on the working poor. That history is vital for any discussion of why the families of the 96 and their city decided to fight back, and why Liverpool Football Club has long been feared and respected, and to understand what this magical season means and doesn't mean.

The British Empire lived on the raw materials coming into Liverpool's port and the finished goods leaving from it. The single most valuable commodity to Liverpool's growth, however, was African slaves. Ships from Liverpool loaded up with goods popular along the West African coast, and they'd sail there to sell them all, then use that money to fill the ships with slaves, then sail to the Americas to sell the slaves and once again use that money to fill their holds with sugar, cotton and tobacco. The dreaded Middle Passage was so named because it was the middle part of a round-trip triangle to Liverpool. The average slave run made 8-10 percent return on investment, which created incredible amounts of wealth and power, according to David Paul's fascinating book "Liverpool Docks." Between 1787 and 1807, every single mayor of Liverpool was connected to the slave trade. The local Heywood family made so much slave money it founded a bank. It has changed hands and been bought and sold and acquired many times and eventually, according to the UK's national archives and the BBC, became part of Barclays. The Leyland family started a bank, too, which was also sold, swallowed and merged many times, according to a family history in the Liverpool Echo and was eventually absorbed within HSBC.

Even after slavery was outlawed, the growing British Empire and its colonies continued to make Liverpool one of the wealthiest cities in the world. Between 1820 and 1865, between 80 and 90 percent of all cotton entered Britain through Liverpool. They built so many ships here that every tree on Lord Sefton's estate was chopped down. The dock toughness touched everyone, even musicians. The famous band on the Liverpool-registered Titanic was employed by a local music company. They kept on playing as they died. That's Liverpool.

The invention of the intermodal shipping container made the port's total annual tonnage crater, because the entire ecosystem of warehouses didn't really need to exist. The longshoreman unions fought containers hard but lost those fights, over and over again as the 1970s ended. In the hot summer of 1981, with unemployment raging and Liverpool coming apart, riots broke out in the Toxteth neighborhood. In response to the riots, the national minister of the treasury urged Thatcher to abandon the city and allow it to wither from a "managed decline," as now-released public records show. Corners of London wanted Liverpool to dry up and die. To fight Thatcher, the voters elected hard-line socialist city governments between 1983 and '87, only to see the Labour Party push those officials out and replace them with ones more mainstream and palatable. The city never forgave the faraway leaders.

"Liverpool has never really looked toward London," Collins says. "It looked to America. It's looked to Ireland. You know what we say: 'Scouse not English.' And that goes back to the '80s. We used to go to Wembley to Cup finals and we would go down in the mid-'80s and they'd play 'God Save the Queen.' We used to sing 'You'll Never Walk Alone' over the national anthem. And I remember for years and years commentators would say on live television, 'This is disgraceful, these Liverpool fans,' you know, disrespecting the queen. But she's living in her gilded palace and there's people struggling to make ends meet in Liverpool and they expect us to sing the anthem."

For three centuries, the working poor of Liverpool did dangerous jobs on ships and on shore so that the investors and powerful families might become incredibly rich. They are the men and women who went to a football match at Hillsborough, where they saw the same powerful people who wanted to erase them from the earth now come for the memories of their sons and daughters. That's who decided to fight the police, politicians and press: the Liverpool working class upon whose backs an empire had been built. They couldn't go back in time to fight those injustices, but this one they could. This time they'd fight, and win, and along the way an insular city somehow become even more closely bound together.