For one month this summer the football came to us — forty-eight countries, three host nations, sixteen cities strung between Vancouver and Mexico City — and then, on a Sunday in New Jersey, it was over and Spain had won.
What takes hold is the turning. A whole cross-grained, disagreeable planet wheeling around for one month to face the same direction at the same time, and you fall in without meaning to. You do not need to tell a back four from a bake sale (we can’t), and still you end up with a team you’ve decided, on no evidence at all, is yours — chosen for the color of the shirt, the face of the manager, a grandmother from the right country, or sheer contrarian loyalty to the smallest nation in the draw. We adopted Cabo Verde — half a million people, at their first World Cup — and defended them warmly to people who had not asked. That we had no business doing this was the whole pleasure of it.
And the delights kept coming. The flag that went up on a balcony two doors down overnight. The ninety-four-year-old down the road who had to be brought up to speed, every day, on who was playing in the final of this “new sport” everyone is so fond of. Half the world sitting down in rows to heave on imaginary oars for a chant invented this spring that looks a thousand years old. Grown men weeping with their entire faces (the blasphemy!), on live television, about a game, and no one telling them to compose themselves.
And then the ending we intend to keep. The winning country matters less than the man who settled it. Ferran Torres, who did not start, came off the bench and scored the one goal that mattered, then said he had struck it “with the power of all the Spanish people.” A substitute. The credit handed straight back to everyone watching. Say that out loud and try to stay unmoved.
That is the least cynical thing left on the calendar. For one month the whole planet agrees to care — loudly, in tandem, about the same small thing — and you get to stand inside that agreement, knowing nothing, earning nothing, wholly part of it for as long as it lasts.
We are smitten. Pull up a stool.