The 29th edition of Europe's women's championship was a two-country affair, played from September 26 to October 4, 2015 across the Netherlands and Belgium. The Dutch championship manager was Peter Blange, who knew this stage well - he had played on the Netherlands men's team that won Olympic gold in Atlanta in 1996. Belgium's was Virginie De Carne, a former international herself. Sixteen national teams arrived for the group stage. Four pools of four played their preliminary matches in four arenas: Omnisport in Apeldoorn, Lotto Arena in Antwerp, Topsportcentrum in Rotterdam, and the Indoor-Sportcentrum in Eindhoven. The top three from each pool advanced. The final rounds moved to the Lotto Arena and to Rotterdam Ahoy, the cavernous venue that would host the climax.

The Netherlands had never won this title. They came into 2015 ranked respectably but were not the favorites; Russia, with eighteen previous European championships, was. What followed was a quiet revelation. The Dutch worked their way through the bracket, riding home-crowd noise that rattled around the steel rafters of Ahoy. Each round they survived, the country leaned in a little more. By the semifinal weekend, orange shirts had become the unofficial uniform of Rotterdam. The bronze medal match, the third-place game, and the final all took place in Ahoy on the closing weekend, with thousands of fans who had not bought tickets for a final still trying to get in.

Russia's outside hitter Tatiana Kosheleva had been the MVP at the 2013 edition in Germany. In 2015 she did it again - back-to-back. Few players in any sport are voted most valuable at consecutive continental championships, and the achievement is harder still in volleyball, where rotations and substitutions distribute glory more democratically than in most team games. Kosheleva did it through pure attack: relentless angles, deep cross-court shots, the kind of swing that bends a defense before it touches the floor. By the final, opposing teams knew exactly where the ball was going. They still could not stop it. Russia's 3-0 victory was efficient rather than dramatic - the work of a team that had done this many times before, against opponents who had not.

Russia took home the trophy and a 19th title. The Netherlands took silver - their best-ever finish at a European championship at the time, a result that turned a generation of Dutch schoolgirls into volleyball fans almost overnight. Serbia took bronze, the closing notes of a tournament that helped establish them as a rising force in the European game. The arenas that hosted the championship kept playing on. Rotterdam Ahoy filled with concerts again the week after. Omnisport Apeldoorn went back to its cycling track. The Lotto Arena returned to its concert calendar. And four years later, in 2019, the men would play their own European championship across many of the same buildings - including a final in Paris that Serbia would win. For one September week in 2015, though, volleyball was something close to a national obsession in the Netherlands. The team that lost the final had made it so.