I keep a note from the day everything changed for me. A date, an hour, one line — since I arrived. I wrote it because some thresholds need a witness, even if the only witness is you, writing it down for your future self.
This World Cup has been full of those lines. Players crossing a threshold they can’t walk back through. A country stepping into a room it has never stood in before. And watching it this week, I realized the tournament isn’t really about who’s best at football. It’s about what people do at the exact moment something ends and something else has to begin.
Neymar: “I Started Here. I Finished Here.”
Brazil lost to Norway in the Round of 16, 2-1. Neymar scored the goal — a stoppage-time penalty, his last act in a Brazil shirt, making him only the second Brazilian man after Pelé to score in four different World Cups. Then he sat down on the grass at MetLife Stadium and cried, and told the cameras it was over.
Here is the detail that stopped me: he made his Brazil debut at that same stadium, back in 2010. I started here. I finished here. Sixteen years, eighty goals, a whole career folded into a single sentence at the exact spot where it began.
I know something about needing a sentence like that. About writing down the threshold instead of pretending it isn’t there. Neymar didn’t get the ending he wanted — nobody does, not really — but he got to name it out loud, in front of everyone, on the same grass. That is its own kind of grace. Not the storybook ending. The honest one.
Cristiano Ronaldo is still playing, at 41, and everyone watching Portugal knows the same clock is running for him. Wonderful players are having their last World Cups this year, whether or not they’ve said so yet. I find I don’t want to rush past that. An ending, done with your eyes open, deserves a paragraph of its own before the tournament moves on to the next headline.
Norway: A New History, Written by Discipline and Will
And then there is Norway, who beat Brazil to get to this same knockout round — and beat Ivory Coast before that — to reach the quarterfinals for the first time in the country’s entire football history.
Norway hadn’t even qualified for a World Cup since 1998. Twenty-eight years away. This is only their fourth appearance ever, and they have never been here before — not close, not this deep. Erling Haaland scored sixteen goals just to get them through qualifying, and he scored twice against Brazil to send them through.
I don’t think that’s a story about one brilliant striker, even though it’s tempting to tell it that way. I think it’s a story about a country that decided, together, to build toward something it had never had proof it could reach. There was no history to lean on. No “we’ve done this before.” Just the will to prepare as if the door might open, long before anyone knew it would.
That is the part I keep returning to. Discipline doesn’t ask for evidence first. It goes to work before the outcome is decided, and sometimes — not always, but sometimes — it gets to watch a new history begin in real time. Norway is 90 minutes into a story nobody could have told about them a month ago. I don’t know how far it goes from here. I know it already means something, the way a first chapter means something even before you know how the book ends.
The Yellow Wave I’m Rooting For
And then there is the hope I’m not even a little objective about.
Colombia has not lost a match yet. They opened with a 3-1 win over Uzbekistan at Estadio Azteca in Mexico City, then beat DR Congo 1-0 in Zapopan. They held Portugal to a 0-0 draw at Hard Rock Stadium in Miami — a draw that was enough to finish the group above Portugal. Then, in the Round of 32, Jhon Arias scored the only goal against Ghana at Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City, and the whole plaza around the team hotel turned into a party — yellow jerseys, flags, a banderazo in the park the night before, “vamos, vamos Colombia” chanted from a hotel balcony.
Four matches, three host countries so far — Mexico twice, the United States twice — and on July 7 they play Switzerland in Vancouver, which means Canada is next. If they win that one, this team will have played, and won or drawn, in every single country hosting this World Cup. All three flags. All three crowds turned yellow for an afternoon.
I have to say something here about James Rodríguez, because I don’t think I’d love this team the way I do without him. He is 34 now, wearing the captain’s armband, and this tournament he quietly became the most-capped World Cup player in Colombian history — passing the record Valderrama and Rincón had shared since 1998 — and he did it playing like it was 1998 again, running the whole game against DR Congo the way El Pibe used to. There is a version of me that will always be watching that 2014 volley against Uruguay, the one that made an entire country stop what it was doing at once. James has been giving me that feeling, on and off, for over a decade — joy that arrives uninvited and takes over a whole afternoon. Watching him still be the one Colombia leans on, still finding the pass no one else sees, still doing it with that same unhurried elegance, is its own quiet gift. Whatever this tournament gives us from here, he has already given me more happiness than I know how to properly thank him for.
This is the part I’m not going to pretend to be neutral about. I want the wins to keep coming. I want more goals — not just enough to advance, but the kind that make a stadium built for someone else’s team suddenly sound like Barranquilla. I want that yellow wave in every stadium they touch, in all three countries, until there are no more countries left to travel to.
Some hopes don’t need a philosophical reason. This one is simple: vamos, Colombia.
Both Things Are True at Once
A career closing at the same stadium where it opened. A country opening a chapter it has waited twenty-eight years to write. Neither cancels the other out. The tournament is holding both, the way a life does — an ending here, a beginning there, sometimes in the very same week, sometimes in the very same match.
I don’t think you get to choose which one you’re living through on a given day. I do think you get to choose how you meet it. Neymar met his ending with tears and a sentence he’d clearly been carrying. Norway is meeting its beginning by simply continuing to show up disciplined, unhistoried, unafraid of not having done this before.
Roma, turned around, becomes Amor. I keep finding that a threshold, turned around and looked at honestly, usually has something warmer inside it than it first appeared to. An ending. A beginning. Both, this week, wearing football boots.
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