Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce announce their engagement

Pop star Taylor Swift and football player Travis Kelce are engaged.

“Your English teacher and your gym teacher are getting married,” the couple captioned a joint post on Instagram announcing the news Tuesday, adding a dynamite emoji and a snippet of Swift’s song “So High School.”

In the first photo, Kelce is shown on bended knee below Swift, who is wearing a striped dress and standing under an elaborate floral arch. A later photo shows Swift sporting a large ring.

The news came just a few weeks after Swift appeared on Kelce’s “New Heights” podcast, which he hosts with his brother, Jason, in one of her most in-depth interviews in years.

That “New Heights” was the vehicle for such an interview was fitting. In 2023, Kelce tried and failed to give Swift his number at one of her concerts on her Eras Tour. He recounted the misfire on an episode of “New Heights” in July of that year, and that was how he caught Swift’s attention.

“This all started when Travis very adorably put me on blast on his podcast, which I thought was metal as hell,” Swift told Time magazine of the couple’s relationship. “We started hanging out right after that. So we actually had a significant amount of time that no one knew, which I’m grateful for, because we got to get to know each other. By the time I went to that first game, we were a couple.”

She also addressed his having called her out in the podcast interview, joking about how he made his failure to get a meet-and-greet everyone’s problem.

“He threw a man-tantrum,” she said. “It was such a wild romantic gesture to just be like, ‘I want to date you.’ ”

Later in the podcast, Kelce joked about the Eras Tour, saying, “All I remember is she didn’t want to meet me.”

While Kelce, a three-time Super Bowl champion, had been a star in his own right for years, and had worked diligently to increase his profile, his relationship with the multi-Grammy Award-winning megastar rocketed him to a new level of stardom.

Swift’s presence at Kelce’s games became the subject of much discussion, frustrating some football fans who argued that the focus on her, and the time it took away from the broadcast, distracted from the sport. It also inspired some right-wing conspiracy theories. (Her presence at his games also appeared to prompt increases in both ticket sales and viewership.)

“I’m just there to support Travis,” she said of her trips to the games in the interview with Time. “I have no awareness of if I’m being shown too much and pissing off a few dads, Brads and Chads.”

Just a few months later, Swift made a whirlwind trip to Las Vegas from Tokyo, where she was performing on the Eras Tour, to watch Kelce and his teammates win the Super Bowl in 2024.

Later that same year, Kelce reciprocated the support, appearing onstage with Swift on the Eras Tour during a performance in London.

The tight end wore a tuxedo complete with tails and top hat for a cameo in a Vaudeville-esque number during the “The Tortured Poets Department” set of the show. (That album contains several tracks that fans believe are about Kelce.) Kelce later said joining Swift in the spotlight was his idea.

And in February, Swift was once again at the Super Bowl to cheer on Kelce and his team, the Kansas City Chiefs, in what ended up being a frustrating loss to the Philadelphia Eagles. On the heels of a down season personally for Kelce, the loss had people speculating about whether he would retire, which he ultimately decided against.

In the months since, with the Eras tour ending and the NFL being in its offseason, both stars were relatively quiet, at least by their own standards. They were guests at a family wedding in Tennessee, she did an impromptu appearance at his annual summit for NFL tight ends, and they fueled engagement rumors, intentionally or not, with a social media post in which Swift appeared to be wearing a large ring. But they seemed to otherwise take something of a break from public life.

With Swift’s new album on the way, the news of the engagement and the NFL season about to begin, that break is officially over.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.