Forty-eight teams, eight games to win it all, and more belief in the heart of every player than a kid with two short parents determined to play in the NBA.
It's a world event that reminds Americans that patriotism goes deeper than cookouts and fireworks on the Fourth of July. It's a feeling that despite the ways your country has come up short, it's home.
It's a Grand Canyon hike that started with you, your husband, and a bighorn sheep at sunrise, and ended with meat sticks, crackers, and a nap in an overheated tent among mule deer in the pines. It's a cacophony of music from NYC buskers, your pick from a diverse, flavorful food landscape, walking outside to the foul smell of rotting trash, then inside to be transported to another realm by the Phantom of the Opera's "Music of the Night."
It's a 10 a.m. walk on a San Francisco beach, talking about everything and nothing with a friend you've shared a formative decade with, holding your infants with the iconic Golden Gate Bridge stretching across the water in the distance. It's the hospital room on the days your children were born, and the backyard lit with luminarias where you married your best friend.
For 90 minutes, the 26 players of the USMNT are the embodiment of that home. They're every reason you've ever had to be thankful for the country you live in or connect with, and they manage to turn a competition, a battle between nations, into a beautiful feeling and moment of camaraderie.
The USMNT tugs at my patriotic heartstrings
In the U.S., we may not ask to be buried in our hometown soccer club's jersey, or, as players in our teens, rely on our soccer income to provide for our entire family, turning the game into equal parts passion and life-or-death necessity.
Still, I managed to break my couch leaping up with alarming speed and force after a Landon Donovan World Cup goal, and without fail, every four years, I'm filled with a sense of pride for my country that I admittedly don't feel very often for the long stretches between tournaments.
There's something about that crest, that jersey, this group of men. A team evolved from the ragtag team of 1950 who hopped on a plane to Brazil with nothing but a hope and a prayer, and managed to upset England with sheer belief and willpower. And a team that, no matter how many times in more recent history they've come up short, still inspires in me a sense of belief.
For one glorious month, that belief just shows up unannounced, that pride waltzes through my front door and takes a seat in my soul, and that hope appears leading me to think that despite realistically understanding I may not see the USMNT win a World Cup in my lifetime, on July 12, we start with a clean slate, and this might just be the year.
So in less than a week, I ironically have plans to grill some game-time burgers as I settle in and am reminded by eleven men on a field playing the beautiful game of a home that I do in fact love.
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