It's reached that melancholy stage of the World Cup tournament. That first day without any games scheduled after a couple of weeks of multiple matches per day. The World Cup has been a part of my life since I was a kid. In the early days, before wall-to-wall TV coverage, it mostly only existed in my imagination or as mythology in books photographs, and grainy satellite images on the news. The names of World Cup heroes present and past were who we pretended to be when we played neighborhood pickup games - Gerd Muller, Franz Beckenbauer, Johan Cruyff, Pele, Rivellino. On summer vacations at my cousin's New Jersey home my brother and I used the huge, slightly sloped, expansive front lawn as the pitch for our own mini-World Cups, replicating an entire tournament bracket of teams one-on-one until we crowned a champion. We'd grab whatever scraps of information we could about the teams and then try to become some version of them. One day my parents stared in disbelief into our b...
