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In the Blood

I'm not a huge soccer fan, but I do have an appreciation for the game. I know who Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo are, for example. I mean, so do millions, if not billions, of other people, but I at least follow the sport enough to know some of the major stars. Hell, I even have a favorite goal, courtesy of Zlatan Ibrahimovic.

Now, as you probably know, the World Cup is happening right about now. For anyone who enjoys watching soccer, this is a big deal. For one, it only happens once every four years. You know that saying about absence making the heart grow fonder? It's like that. Imagine if the preseason was three years long. You'd be awfully curious how your team played in the "real" season, wouldn't you? Now throw in the fact that your team isn't just for your local city or even the state/county. No, it's for the entire country. There's quite a bit of pride and fandom that gets mixed in with the whole thing, with good reason.

Personally, I was especially curious this year, because Peru had qualified for the World Cup after a 36 year drought. I wanted them to do well, so I probably kept track of the scores a tad more than I would have otherwise. Hell, at one point, I was tracking the outcome of the game on a laptop because I wasn't near a television.

Sadly, the Peruvian team did not do very well this year. They were mathematically eliminated after their first two games, so I didn't have as much to root for after that. Still, the World Cup had my attention by that point, and I wasn't about to stop watching. It also gave me something to talk about with friends and coworkers, so it was kind of fun.

The funniest thing, though, came in how I described the whole thing. Inevitably, someone would be surprised that I followed soccer, and I ended up having to explain it. Given everything that I've said up to this point, it should probably come as no surprise that I boiled it all down to, "it's just in the blood. Every four years, the World Cup stirs it up in me."

Soccer is my blood, folks.
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