Celebrities get engaged all the time; sometimes they even go through with the wedding. Dua Lipa and Callum Turner recently got married at a town hall in London and then hosted a larger ceremony, a few days later, at a villa in Palermo. In June, Tom Holland confirmed that he and Zendaya had married in a private ceremony. (Nothing else is known about the event, but A.I.-generated wedding photos have been circulating on the internet.) Last summer, Charli XCX married George Daniel, a member of the band the 1975. (They, too, had a small ceremony in London and threw a big party in Sicily.) Matty Healy, that band’s front man—and the last person Swift is known to have dated before Kelce—is set to marry Gabbriette Bechtel, a model, sometime this month, according to Healy’s mother.

But the Swift-Kelce engagement—and the subsequent planning for the Swift-Kelce wedding—immediately took on a larger significance. As one of the most famous people alive, Swift seemed to be entering into less a marriage than a merger between America’s two state religions (pop music and football). For Swift’s fans, the nuptials also promised a kind of narrative closure: after the pop star spent years singing about imagined weddings, her life was finally catching up with her art. She is the inverse of Jane Austen, who produced an entire body of work devoted to marriage plots—six novels, all ending with weddings—despite never marrying herself.

This is all to say that if you care about Swift’s music, even vaguely, then her marriage to Kelce is notable, if only because it signifies the end of a two-decade-long musical chapter and, presumably, the beginning of a new one. But I won’t pretend that this is the sole reason people care about Taylor Swift’s wedding. Celebrity weddings are often grand spectacles, and Swift is a billionaire. As a fan wrote online, a few days before the event, it would be fascinating to see “what a romantic with her money would pull off.”

A few weeks ago, one of America’s most trusted news sources, TMZ, reported that Swift and Kelce would get married on July 3rd, at Madison Square Garden, in midtown Manhattan, the lint-filled belly button of New York City. Almost immediately, fans began speculating that M.S.G. was a decoy, meant to divert voyeurs away from the real wedding venue, which was surely beautiful, elegant, and almost definitely somewhere in Rhode Island, where Swift owns a historic oceanfront mansion. If the music was any guide, then M.S.G. was a fake-out: in her 2012 track “The Lucky One”—from the album “Red”—one of her many songs about embracing the simple life, Swift sings, approvingly, about someone who “chose the rose garden over Madison Square.”

Another lyric from that same album: “Everything has changed.” Over the past few days, as Swift wrapped up the final preparations for her wedding, more reports emerged—of Kelce’s teammates booking rooms at the Marriott Marquis in Times Square, of an N.Y.P.D. memo outlining a private two-day event at the Garden—and her fans slowly came to terms with the idea that the Queen of Love Songs would get married in the same basketball arena where Tony Hinchcliffe once performed. Swifties, trying to stay optimistic, posted A.I. renderings of the kind of soundstage that could be built inside the twenty-thousand-square-foot space. A common refrain: “She can bring the rose garden to Madison Square!” Page Six reported that a castle was being built inside the venue, whereas People magazine later reported that there would not be a castle. (Apparently, there was indeed a castle.)

Others twisted themselves in knots trying to argue that M.S.G. was not just an appropriate venue but the only possible venue for the kind of event that Swift was trying to put on: a wedding with a thousand guests, including performances from some of those guests. (Stevie Nicks, Paul McCartney, Fergie, and Ciara performed.) Most important, though, was the security aspect. The Garden, an enclosed space with no exterior windows, has an underground tunnel system, allowing guests to arrive and leave unseen. This, combined with a permit to block nearby streets and a heavy police presence, would keep the venue safe from drones, stalkers, Swifties, paparazzi, and random passersby with smartphones.