From Saturday, June 27

Never really started watching sports with any sort of enthusiasm till recently. Not sure how good a peripatetic I am, but the first thing that got me going was winning PSAL for track. Cheered for my team during NYSAIS - we get our asses handed to us by Hackley and Collegiate; Hackley took first place in states. While David’s son attends collegiate, he agrees with me that Hackley’s players and parents are pretty obnoxious about their winnings.

Then Bri gets me into Wimbledon - actually watched a match that Andy Roddick predictably won and a bit of the Mahut/Isner match during the second day. Since I’m absolutely WIRED from a pot of coffee I brewed this afternoon, I’ll have to catch up with that at some point tonight.

And of course there’s the world cup. The closest America has come to winning in YEARS upon YEARS, and Ghana destroys us on a lucky shot, running the clock well past overtime and having refs that played favorites allowing them to drop to the field when they didn’t get hit at all! Be it noted that our own players, Including Dempsey, were knocked around several times during some critical moments but each time they got back on their feet and kept playing, despite the fact that several of these fouls were visibly intentional. We had our miracle moments up until a minute before the clock ran out - but we were just too tired to go on. We lost to Ghana like this last year, and while I didn’t watch that match, there was some absolutely disgraceful sabotage directed against us today.

I’m a patriot through and through - been cheering “USA!” for the winter and summer Olympics since I was in diapers - and this just cuts me to the bone right here. Will we progress further next year through FIFA? Maybe, maybe not. Will we face equally if not even stiffer competition? Most definitely now that we have the world’s attention. What this tournament has shown is that America is a force to be reckoned with. Whatever successes we make in the future will be built on those we’ve just made, and other countries WILL have reason to fear us. I can only hope that as a country we start paying better attention to international sports and sacrifice our folksier ones in the process.