The final four games of the World Cup are normally the only soccer I ever watch. The high vantage point, lack of scoring and methodical, zen-like passing have long been far less interesting to me than the action and speed of football, basketball, and hockey, and the historical richness and suspense of baseball.

This year, everything changed. 

Desperate for positivity in this mind-numbing political climate we’re in, a friend invited us to a public park around the corner the night of the first USA match with Paraguay, and we totally got into the game on a big screen with a few hundred cheering local residents. It then took no time at all for me to get hooked on videos of insane global watch parties responding to every goal; to Scotland fans flooding the streets of Boston with their kilts and bagpipes and drinking the city dry; to Norwegian mobs clogging Times Square to perform their “rowing” ritual; to watching the unfathomable brilliance of Lionel Messi nearly every time he touched the ball.

And then we went to Norway and Sweden for two weeks, where soccer was absolutely everything. Around the corner from our friends’ place in Oslo, 100,000 people crammed the hill leading up to the Royal Palace for a watch party and mass rowing. Erling Haaland was modeling eyeglasses in store windows. I watched games with Norwegian and Swedish announcing teams and didn’t care, stayed up till 2 a.m. to see Switzerland beat Colombia with penalty kicks. I still don’t quite get the offsides rule, or the randomness of stoppage time, or what constitutes a foul and what doesn’t—but I don’t care about that either.

In short, baseball had suddenly taken a major back seat in my sports head, so much so that I wasn’t even aware my Red Sox had a huge winning streak going until a few days ago. The passion of the visiting soccer fans have given us a nationwide joy we’ve been badly lacking. Even with the President personally crushing the hopes of the U.S. team with his selfish meddling, the joy has not dissipated. The England matches vs. Mexico, Norway and Argentina were all-timers, and tomorrow I’ll be back home (at a reasonable hour), glued to the Spain-Argentina Final with the friend who first lured us around that corner. 

Sad to think we have to wait another four years for this glorious event…