DREAMERS ONLY

It was a typically scorching hot July day in Palo Alto – the day before my 9th birthday, which means it was the 4th of July. My family was making the long march from a far-off parking lot, after having driven the familiar four hours from Redding to the Bay Area to watch the United States Men’s National Team play the almighty Brazil in the 1994 FIFA Men’s World Cup. I can’t remember how much I knew about the tournament back then, but it feels like very little. My brother Brian was three days out from his 14th birthday and, having already played competitive soccer for years, probably understood the spectacle better than I did — but who knows.

 And what did my parents know of the World Cup? Enough to buy the tickets, drive us, paint our faces, buy t-shirts, and give all of us, them included, the opportunity to experience a little piece of a future life not a single one of us could have imagined.

When I think about the World Cup now, it comes in this order: ‘99, ‘94, ‘19. 2011 and 2015 were heartwrenching and triumphant, respectively, but I can't separate how I feel about 2019 from being a kid in the stands in ‘99 and ‘94. In so many ways, it feels like 2019 was in my body before it ever happened. The buzz of anticipation and childlike giddiness of walking into Stanford Stadium. The bright light and heat of the July sun in Lyon. The possibility of something magical happening with having no idea what that magical thing could even be. So much of what I felt in 2019 felt familiar — and while it was of course built on the millions of intentional little steps it took to get there, to be there like THAT, it simultaneously felt like being 8 years old again: squinting through the sun, American flag painted on my face, in sheer amazement at what was unfolding before my very eyes.

As this World Cup has arrived, naturally all the feels have come rushing back. Now that I’m on the other, other side of things – not a kid seeing it for the first time, not a player experiencing it for the first time – I'm struck by the feeling that winning the World Cup felt a lot like watching the World Cup for the first time. Part real, part dream, all of it utterly inconceivable. What is so different, really, between a winner's medal placed around your neck while surrounded by people you love and who love you, and face paint in your nation's colors applied to your face by people you love and who love you? The World Cup is so much more than a competition where one country claims the title of World Champion. It is so much more than one player, one team, one country. It’s about feeling and dreaming and believing. It’s seeing Kristine Lilly and Mia Hamm and Briana Scurry in the World Cup for the first time, and then recognizing myself in the faces of fans losing their minds at Parc des Princes so many years later. It’s being in hysterics over a stoppage-time winner with a stranger at a bar and never, ever forgetting what that felt like. 

That's the magic of the World Cup. It connects the past and the present to our deepest hopes and dreams, the joys and agonies that we feel as we live and breathe this beautiful game. For me, it was a portal into what soccer could be – and what, maybe, I could be. But more than anything, the World Cup taught me how to dream.