Today the Slovak hockey team beat the Finnish hockey team. Do you care slightly more if I add:

for the first time in 22 years.

No?

Yeah, I also don’t care that much.

Slovaks do. Especially the men.

Maybe the women care too, because if the Slovak team wins their husbands are finally in a good mood and even easier to manage and boss around.

To be fair I had some of this male shortcut to delude myself into having experienced something ‘epic’ until as far back as 2018.

And it only ever got triggered by the Belgian national soccer team. Probably reinforced by my liking underdogs who have some chance to win, but not really.

It went like this:

World Cup, 1990, am 7, I get the bug and am quite annoyed that Belgium loses to England.

World Cup, 1994, one of my peaks of believing life would be great and had much to offer. I suspect feeling positive about life in general makes one more open to being enthusiastic about 11 guys chasing a ball and believing it matters. The joy of beating the Netherlands.

The anger when Josip Weber was denied a penalty on the 2nd of July 1994 in Chicago against the German team. The Germans ended up winning 3 to 2 and Belgium was out.

World Cup, 1998, emotionally invested, but diminished. Life had already shown some of its ugliness. I already had less bandwidth. But I cared. Belgium’s performance was underwhelming. I do remember that.

Euro 2000. Kinda the same as 1998. Very dissapointing. Especially since Belgium was one of the host countries… I ended up rooting for Portugal. Other underdog with a chance.

World cup 2002. I was still invested. My father no longer was. I taped a match so I could watch it as if it were life after taking an exam. I couldn’t watch it live cause I had an exam that day. My father half mocked me for caring, was half amused and endeared I still cared enough to tape the match.

World cup 2006. Belgium didn’t participate and I had a very, very active sex life back then. I was in no need of soccer anesthesia and I don’t remember watching a single match. Maybe I did, I just don’t remember.

World cup 2010. Belgium didn’t participate, but Slovakia did, so I kinda rooted for Slovakia. I didn’t live in Slovakia yet, but had some connection with it already. Still, can’t remember anything other than writing unsellable short stories while half watching matches and correcting boring exams.

World cup 2014. I watched and do not remember even one second. That should tell you something, I vividly remember 1994, but not 2014. 2014 was a most shitty year, I think I have blocked it out almost entirely, not just the world cup.

World cup 2018. Mild interest in how Belgium was faring, but unlike with older tournaments I can’t tell you against whom they played. They lost against France, I think. Which I likely remember cause am not a fan of France at all. Cause French fries are not French, they are Belgian. Oh, and they’re arrogant even though the US had to save them from the Germans twice.

World cup 2022. I don’t even know if it was played in 2022. I think Belgium lost to France AGAIN and I would rather lose to any other country except for Israel or the US. Even The Netherlands would be preferable. They are also arrogant, but the US had to save them from the Germans only once and they don’t call French fries French.

So you could say that caring about these things maybe goes hand in hand with still being enchanted by humanity and society or not.

And I think I loved the world cup of 1994 because it was a different world and those teams felt unique, with mystique, they still came with mystery, now they’re just brands and near identical scientifially optimized machines.

Also, in 1994 things felt possible.

By 1998 Belgium was associated with Dutroux and pedophilia. School was sucking the life out of me. It became clear sex was going to ruin my life. My father was slowly but surely losing all appetite for life. In 2000 Bush would be president. Iraq invasion would follow. Obama would kill all illusions with his false hope. I could list so many things. I suppose in 1994 things like the Rwandan genocide and the Yugoslav wars, which I was aware of, were maybe more like anomalies in an otherwise stabilized world to me.

I don’t actually know.

What I can say with certainty is that I acutely remember the feelings, the national vibe, my street, and the weather of 1994, the faces of the players of 1994.

This tells me that 1994 was most likely a pivotal moment for me.

And now I can’t possibly care about sport events, because the world where I did care does not exist anymore. A world where I wasn’t hurt yet. A world where success still looked earned. Apart from the Germans beating Belgium of course, thanks to no penalty for an obvious faul on Weber.