Deadline!

Journalists love it and hate it. We love the rush. We hate that it probably will shorten our lives. (Or, less dramatically, get us in trouble for missing it.)

We will be dealing with deadline for the World Cup final tomorrow.

The tournament that has been played in daylight hours in the western hemisphere has been a nighttime affair over here in the Gulf.

And deadline has been beating us up, here at The National. At least for the World Cup and the print product.

Our absolute latest deadline, usually, is 1:15 a.m.

Which means all those midnight games (4 p.m. EDT, 1 p.m. PDT) we’ve had since the knockout rounds started … have not made the newspaper. At best, those ended at 1:50 a.m. — or 35 minutes after we closed.

That means we missed half of the round of 16, half of the quarterfinals and both semifinals.

Ugh. We hate going in without being “complete”.

At least we had a nice online packages at our World Cup microsite.

For the championship match, however, we have a chance of getting the game in the paper. And that’s all we ask. A chance.

The kickoff is an hour earlier, at 11 p.m. our time, and we’ve gotten an extra 15 minutes (a one-shot deal) on the back end, to 1:30.

So, we’ve got something like 35 minutes from the end of the 90-minute game to get a news story and two columns (and a bunch of photos) into the paper.

But it has to be a 90-minute game. If it is tied, they will play another 30 minutes, and there goes our newspaper account of the championship match.

Meantime, we have backup type for the three late pages, and it will be done hours before deadline. World Cup oriented, but nothing about the game, other than a photo and headline directing readers to our website.

If it’s 1-1 after 90 minutes, those three Plan B pages go into the newspaper, and we are frustrated.

If we have a winner … we have Plan A — three late pieces of type, half a dozen photos, the headlines and captions, and we have to hit the button at 1:30 a.m.

It will be fun. In a sickening sort of way.