Recommended listening: La Revancha del Tango (Gotan Project)
I lived in El Puerto de Santa Maria del Buen Aire during the summer of 2009. I was studying, partying, and working (don’t remember in what order), covering midterm elections and fashion(?) for a news agency near La Casa Rosada (Argentina’s White House, except it’s pink). The peso was 3 to the dollar in the aftermath of one of the country’s perennial financial crises. And the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo were marching as they have every week since 1977 in memory of their children who were disappeared by Videla’s military junta.
It was my first time living in a metropolis. Doing it in a second language was rewarding but extremely difficult. I’d walk 40 blocks at a time to keep from figuring out the bus system—with no smart phone, you had to buy a little booklet and do some detective work to figure out the routes and schedules. I cursed, in halting Castellano, a driver who almost hit me in Monserrat. Once, some out-of-towners asked me for directions, mistaking me for a local. A proud moment.
I saw Messi against Colombia at El Monumental and fell in love. As the kind of person who cares about sportsmanship and fairness and getting things “right”—to the point that I will happily call fouls on my own team in pickup soccer—I think the Albiceleste is the only team I support that is properly villainous. Trust me when I tell you I understand why people hate them.
As someone who tries to avoid being confidently wrong (and unwilling to apologize for it), following La Selección might be the only time in my life when I access that part of myself. Watching the semi-final at Barra Ñ in Chicago, I chuckled when my compañeros decried every Argentine foul as an unforgivable English flop.
And I was there for every bit of it. Somehow, the passion, belief, and emotion of this team and its fans feels completely pure to me, in spite of whatever Dark Arts are playing out on the field.
Then there’s Messi, who somehow transcends the villainy. How lucky we are to have watched him for the past 23 years. Maybe that’s what these feelings are really about: the hope that the dream isn’t over quite yet.
For the past 12 years, I have watched the important games among the faithful at Argentine-owned bars in Chicago. La Selección has made me feel things that my own national team is incapable of:
2014 v. Germany (tears)
2018 v. France (shock)
2022 v. France (ecstasy, revenge)
2026 v. England (wonder)
I thought 2022 was as good as it could get. The culmination of all of the dreams of the little boy from Rosario who had come up short so many times, finally cementing his legacy at the ripe age of 35. And somehow he’s still doing it at almost 40.
If I were Jorge Luis Borges, I might entertain the theory that there are not one but several Messis, each playing on a pitch slightly displaced from the others, and that what we call his career is merely the visible seam where these Messis occasionally align: 2014 a divergence, 2018 a further one, 2022 a correction, and this Sunday, perhaps, at last a convergence: all the boys from Rosario arriving simultaneously at the same net, the same ball, the same eternal ninetieth minute, so that when he finally lifts the cup it will not be one man’s triumph but the settling of accounts across every timeline in which he almost did and didn’t.
And if I were Julio Cortázar, I might get stuck on the idea that we who have watched those boys on the field have become synchronized strangers off it. You and I have never met and yet on many occasions we may have wept or jumped up and down, at the same second, over the same small man doing an almost impossible thing with a ball, and if that isn’t a kind of secret society then I don’t know what a secret society is for.
A nagging part of me worries that this chapter of the fairytale may not have the ending that will make us happiest on Sunday. The other part of me refuses to write off the power of faith. And of course, faith and dread aren’t in opposition to each other; they are two hands of the same clock. You can’t have the ecstasy of ‘22 without keeping, somewhere in reserve, the tears of ‘14, they’re drawing from the same account.
So: dale, Argentina. We’ll sit in our particular rooms, in our particular hours, and all the other strangers will sit with us, to see if it can be done one last time.
🇦🇷 Por el Diego, por la última de Leo, Argentina quiero verte bicampeón 🇦🇷
Home tour
A Gardener’s Home in Argentina Boasts Flowing Green Spaces
By Melissa Dalton for Dwell
No time for links — the final is starting! — but here’s a quick topical home tour.
Seth Putnam is an editor and writer in Chicago. He lives with his wife, son, and daughter in a 1920s home that is the epitome of a work in progress.
“Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.” —Mary Oliver