Football. Futbol. Football. For a month the greatest sport in the world has its name back. Despite the best efforts of this heathen land to insist that a silly activity played with hands and body armor should steal the name of the planet’s favorite game, until July Ninth, Football is Football.

The World Cup is the greatest sporting event in the world. One billion, one-hundred million people watched the 2002 final. (This is about 1.1 billion more than the number of people who care about the Big Game.) God, if only I could get 1.1 billion people to watch me do physics...

Football is life. No, it’s more than life. Life is miserable and depressing. It’s filled with failed opportunities and constant disappointments. Football, on the other hand, is completely different. Well, maybe not completely different, but eventually your team will win something and you’ll experience a brief, transitory moment of happiness. Unless you’re English.

Now, I was expecting that, despite the general delightfulness of the US of A and its people, the atmosphere greeting la Copa del Mundo would be less than lively. After all, you people are a little backward when it comes to sporting matters.

In fact, if I were somewhat more sociologically inclined I might make an observation about the parallels between the global obscurity of America’s leading sports and your country’s insistence on conducting its foreign affairs without a thought for the rest of the world’s point of view.

And if I were really in the mood to run with the intellectual pretension, I’d also point out that the repeated assertions of the superiority of American sports in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary bears more than a little resemblance to the philosophy of American Exceptionalism and its associated hubris.

I suppose that if I were also some kind of socialist I might top off the previous couple of remarks by noting that the 60/40 blend of commercials and sporting action during televised American sporting events speaks volumes about rampant unchecked capitalism and its tendency to drown whatever it touches.

However, I’m not really the Noam Chomsky type, so let’s get back to the matter at hand: Football.

Stanford is really dull. Not just dull because there’s nothing to do, but dull because there’s no one to do it with. Football is a community sport. It’s best followed in public, watched in pubs and discussed over pints. Especially when it’s the World Cup.

Now, since communal watching and the like require a community, you can probably see how the low expectations arose. It turns out, however, that I was wrong.

Apparently Stanford kids aren’t quite the insular, America-centric stereotypes we like to mock back in the old country; and, thanks to the efforts of some of my peers and the lovely folks at the 750, we’ve had every game shown in the GCC.