The “American Idol Live!” summer concert tour — featuring this year’s American Idol top seven plus a special guest, Season 8 winner Kris Allen — kicks off this week, and many fans will be buying tickets mainly to witness the onstage chemistry between the cutest couple in Idol history: winner Maddie Poppe and runner-up Caleb Lee Hutchinson. (From Justin to Kelly ain’t got nothin’ on these two.)

Poppe and Hutchinson secretly paired up during this past season’s Hollywood Week, which filmed back in January. (“He was like totally like, ‘Maddie, we’re going to have the cutest kids!’ I was like, ‘We’re just friends, Caleb,’” Poppe recalls. “The first day I was like, ‘Yeah, no, I’m going to marry you.’ It freaked her out, and then I conned her into it,” Hutchinson chuckles.) They then waited until the Season 16 finale to officially declare their relationship status, sealing the deal with an adorable duet of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”/“What a Wonderful World.” But while their romance is still going strong more than two months later, Poppe confesses — much to Hutchinson’s shock — that she wishes that their duet could get a “do-over.”

Caleb Lee Hutchinson and Maddie Poppe (Photo: ABC)

Poppe explains during an exclusive interview with Yahoo Entertainment that when she and Hutchinson reached the song’s final line, she wasn’t sure which note he planned to hit — so she backed off and clammed up. “I went, ‘What a wonderful…’ and then I just stopped singing. I wish I could redo that part. I felt so awkward; I looked so awkward when I watched it back. I’m like, ‘Maddie, just hold his hand!’ I was so awkward.”

“That’s something only you would have noticed. I think everybody was too busy weeping over the beauty of it,” Hutchinson interjects snarkily. “I thought it was heavenly. Thank you for hating it! I appreciate it.”

Poppe also admits she wishes she could redo the top 14 week’s “Walk Like an Egyptian” and her first performance of her coronation single, “Going Going Gone.” (“I cringe when I watch that… I know I could have done better, and I don’t like that that’s out there on the Internet now.”) But the more go-with-the-flow Hutchinson insists he has “no regerts,” saying: “Yeah, I just don’t care. I have the attitude about it that it’s done and it happened how it was supposed to. You can’t sit around and think about anything about how you would change it.”

Hutchinson actually received much harsher critiques than his girlfriend did on Idol, which often upset the protective Poppe more than it did Hutchinson himself. (“I would watch him backstage and I’m like, ‘Wow, that was so good!’ Then they’d be like, ‘That was my least favorite performance of yours,’” she recalls ruefully.) But Hutchinson shrugs, “There were a few times where [the judges] gave me some real criticism, but I think it was helpful. … I agreed with a lot of what they said. I think if you’re scared of some criticism, you’re never going to make any progress. My experience is singing for folks in restaurants who would rather eat their steak than listen to me sing; I’ve been doing that since I was 11. I was so open to the fact that I’m not going to be the best singer to be on national television singing to millions of folks at home. I was never like, ‘Man, I can’t believe they were mean to me!’ I was like, ‘All right, write it down, put it in the old noggin, and use it for what it’s worth.’”

Hutchinson remains humble — joking about he’s “writing songs in the basement” while Poppe is working on her post-Idol album with pros like Julia Michaels, Anne Preven (who co-wrote Natalie Imbruglia’s “Torn”), fun.’s Nate Ruess, and Christina Perri — but right now, he and Poppe are looking forward to the tour, on which they’ll maybe get a shot at some those “do-overs” without any TV pressure.

“Let me tell you something: After the show’s over, it’s like a bittersweet thing, but there’s this sigh of relief that I no longer have to worry about the outcome,” says Hutchinson. “It’s a beautiful thing. I felt like 100,000 pounds leaped off my shoulders. We’re going to start our careers — and if something goes downhill with mine, I can be Maddie’s rhythm guitar player.”

Check out Maddie and Caleb’s chemistry-filled, incredibly entertaining Facebook Live interview below for more talk about their album recording plans, whether they they’ll ever write or record together, bonding with Kris Allen and Kermit the Frog, the differences between their Idol experience and their previous respective unsuccessful appearances on The Voice, and if they’ll ever get to take that Hawaiian vacation.

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American Idol runner-up Caleb Lee Hutchinson and winner Maddie Poppe. (Photo: Eric McCandless/ABC vía AP)

Call it a real-life From Justin to Kelly. Or, more specifically, From Caleb to Maddie.

Monday night on American Idol’s finale, Maddie Poppe won the title — but she also announced that she had won the heart of runner-up Caleb Lee Hutchinson. The two officially came out as a couple during the live broadcast, and the audience gasped with surprised delight at the adorable news. While two other top 10 contestants, Gabby Barrett and Cade Foehner, had been open about their romance this season (at least after Ryan Seacrest outed them on Disney Night), until now, Maddie and Caleb had kept their relationship on the down-low.

“We didn’t really want people to think that we weren’t focused on the show, and also Cade and Gabby had just kind of announced that they were dating, and so we didn’t want to take away their thunder, you know,” Poppe tells Yahoo Entertainment the morning after her win, adding with a laugh, “Caleb and I kind of joked, when people would ask about us, that we were cousins!”

Poppe and Hutchinson had a couple reasons for keeping their relationship status under wraps. “We started dating around the top 24 week, and we’d noticed that there were some other couples who had gotten split up along the way,” Poppe recalls. She began to suspect that the show’s powers that be frowned upon contestants dating, and she worried that she and Hutchinson would meet a similar Romeo-and-Juliet-like fate. “I mean, it’s just my conspiracy theory, but we really didn’t want anybody to know [we were an item], because we didn’t want the producers to find out and split us up!”

The other reason for the couple’s secrecy was more competitive and strategic: “Caleb needed the women’s vote. So, we both were like, ‘He needs to appear single!’” Poppe reveals — demonstrating just how supportive the two were of each other throughout the season.

“Truly, once it got down to me and Caleb [on the finale], I really didn’t care who won,” Poppe stresses. “I mean, of course I still wanted to win, but I would have been just as happy if he had won.” When Seacrest eventually announced Poppe’s name, Hutchinson was equally thrilled. “He was so proud. He’s just super-supportive, and he was really happy for me. I mean, he’s my boyfriend, but he could have been bitter or, you know, kind of jealous. But he wasn’t any of that. He treated me like his girlfriend, not a competitor, so that was pretty cool.”

Poppe and Hutchinson started the season platonically, but they formed a bond from the start. “I met him the first day of Hollywood Week, and of all the people that day, he stood out to me the most,” Poppe recalls. “And I thought, ‘I have to get him in my group for Group Rounds!’ I found him and asked him, ‘Do you want to be in my group?’ And we hung out pretty much every day since then. We were friends at first, because we really weren’t looking to date. We weren’t looking for anything. But then, man, I don’t know, he just captured my heart. What can I say?”

From then on, they were each other’s support systems, offering each other feedback (for instance, Hutchinson and his parents encouraged Poppe to do Melanie’s “Brand New Key” during top 24 week). And they were able to separate the professional from the personal, as they both kept their eye on the Idol prize. “Caleb would say, ‘Well, do you want my advice as your boyfriend, or as your competitor?’” Poppe chuckles.

Someone else who gave the 20-year-old Iowa singer-songwriter advice throughout the season was judge Katy Perry, who made no secret that Poppe was her favorite — even boldly telling Poppe, “I’m voting for you!” on Sunday night. “That really meant a lot. That was kind of winning in itself, because I know she’s been a super-big supporter of me throughout this whole thing,” gushes Poppe. “Even when I was an underdog, she was always giving me shout-outs on Twitter. I think that actually influenced people on the fence to become my fans, just because she’s such a huge name and a pretty influential person. I don’t think it hurt. I’m sure that it helped me. And yeah, that was a really cool moment.”

Poppe says she assumed she was this season’s “underdog” partially because of Idol’s past track record, in which “WGWG” contestants like Kris Allen, Lee DeWyze, and Phillip Phillips prevailed, but their acoustic-strumming female counterparts never did. “One reason why I thought I would or could never win this is because [past contestants] like Crystal Bowersox and Brooke White were my idols when I watched the show, and they didn’t win,” she explains. “Crystal got second place, and she was my favorite. And so, I thought that’s what would happen with me, because I was so similar to them. Plus, we had powerhouses [this season] like Gabby [Barrett] and Ada [Vox], and a country voice like Caleb’s — all kinds of super-mainstream popular music and country music has such a big fanbase. I wasn’t seen as mainstream music. And so that was something that was really scary going into this. But I knew that whatever happened was supposed to happen, and even if I didn’t win, I was doing what I love.”

As Poppe prepares to release her major-label debut with the show’s new affiliated music company, Hollywood Records, she’s feeling optimistic about being able to adhere to her artistic vision — thanks to support from Hutchinson and encouragement from Perry, who actually gave Poppe an inspiring “pep talk” right after Monday’s finale. “Katy came up to me and she told me, ‘Don’t let people change you. There’s gonna be people who want you to do all kinds of different stuff. There’s gonna be people who will try to tell you what to do. You can’t let them do that. Stand your ground, and don’t give up easily.’

“But some of the biggest advice Katy’s given me, really honestly, is to just be myself — because I think that’s what got me this far. And I think it’s really cool that I didn’t have to change anything about myself to be accepted by America. I just could do exactly what I wanted, and I ended up winning. I can’t even believe that. That’s a really cool feeling.”

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This article originally ran on Yahoo Music.