Your Last World Cup

My mother has a way with words.

My father was watching a World Cup match the other day when my mother came in and said, "This will probably be your last World Cup."

He told me about it and we laughed. My mother has a way with words. Back in the '80s, on a family trip, she told my father to give up his gun as we passed a sign at airport security that read something like: *All jokes about weapons will be taken seriously.*

She also famously asked me, after I'd been injured yet again, whether I was getting hurt on purpose. My soccer career was riddled with tears and pulls and brokens…

And while my father didn't have a gun at the airport, my mother might be right about the other things.

Those of you following along know my obsession with what I call the oppositional engine. The forces that run the universe and push and pull us around like the tides and our breath and the beating of our hearts.

Death is part of that engine. So when I hear *your last World Cup*, I stop. I think about the time we have left; with ourselves, with our loved ones, with all the other things we attach to.

For all of us whose lives are touched by football, by soccer, the world stops every four years, and we are confronted by moments that stop us in our tracks. Mine came on suddenly. USA versus Paraguay. The Star-Spangled Banner, sung by two men in harmony at SoFi. Lost my shit. Proud and embarrassed, in tears, from a moment only sport and sentimentality can bring on.

And some deeper desire to hold onto a moment that cannot stay, but will not go away.

Will this be your last World Cup? I desperately hope not.

SoFi, before USA–Paraguay.